When he was a kid, Allen Bardwell remembers getting to ring the bell that hung atop Bow Baptist Church. It’s easy to understand the shock he felt when he saw the steeple go up in flames last summer.
On Tuesday, Bardwell, 58, stood across the street from the historic building gazing up toward the sky while shooting video on his phone as a new steeple was hoisted and placed where the old one burned in a fire last year.
He and his wife, Katie, and son, Nathan, joined about a dozen others watchers first thing in the morning as the crane lowered the steeple into place. The moment marked a milestone in what will be an ongoing restoration process for the building that houses Crossroads Community Church.
“With how it happened and when it happened, that was God,” said Bardwell, whose father serves on the fire department and called him when steeple went up. “The steeple was getting to a point where it needed to be fixed. It was getting bad.”
Lightning struck the steeple in July 2018, sparking an intense blaze that fire crews managed to prevent from spreading to the rest of the nearly 200-year-old structure. The steeple was completely destroyed, and the interior below sustained heavy water damage.
Members of the congregation, as well as their pastor, Rev. Richard Huntley, have long known their house of worship needed some attention. The steeple was in disrepair, the church needed a coat of paint, and the windows and shutters – all original – needed some touching up. But with a small congregation and limited funds, these projects have been on hold for years.
Other members of the congregation shared Bardwell’s sentiment, that the fire was the act of a greater power sparking efforts to restore the church.
Since the fire, church members applied for and got the building was added to the New Hampshire Register of Historic Places. The congregation is now working on raising money to get a matching New Hampshire Land and Community Heritage Investment Program grant for the rest of the project.
The New Hampshire Preservation Alliance has helped the church members connect with these resources. Staff there reached out to Huntley after reading about the fire in the Monitor, said Andrew Cushing, a field service representative with the organization.
The Alliance is currently working on 100 projects with historical structures across the state, he said, and it is increasingly churches seeking the support.
“Churches are struggling right now, membership is dwindling and there’s usually less resources to devote to the building,” Cushing said. “It’s an issue a lot of churches face: do we put money toward our mission or do we put it toward our building.”
Cushing and Huntley said insurance has covered the cost to replace the steeple, which was built by Steve Fifield, who specializes in restoring structures from the 18th and 19th centuries and is based in Canterbury.
Using old photographs of the church and its original steeple, Fifield designed the new one down to every detail, including a set of balustrades and some old finials that had been stored away.
“Steve spent a lot of hours analyzing all the details,” Huntley said. “It’s a real pleasure to see it being placed up there.”
Fifield stood high above the onlookers with his son, Oliver, and niece, Kate Witschonke, as the three of them guided the steeple into place and mounted it onto the building.
Betty Fifield, Steve’s wife, watched from the ground level with Cushing and others from the N.H. Preservation Alliance. The group has partnered with the Fifields on several projects, including the restoration of the Bow Bog Meetinghouse.
“The preservation alliance is making people aware that we don’t want to lose this heritage,” she said. “It’s important to the state.”
This church is valued historically for its role in the anti-slavery movement.
Built in 1832 under the ministry of the Rev. William Boswell, the church was later led by the Rev. Henry Archibald, a leading abolitionist in Bow and the Concord area. The church’s nearby parsonage was a safe house on the Underground Railroad in the mid-19th century, and it is believed that the church would use its weather vane to signal if the area was safe for the men and women escaping slavery.
It is often said that the people within the congregation make the church, not the building. But the historical significance of this church is deserving of special care, said Bardwell.
“It’s the people who count, but the building in its own right has so much historical value,” he said.
Bardwell lives nearby with his family. He said he heard the loud crack of lightning and then an explosion that day, followed minutes later by the sounds of fire engines screaming past his house. His father, who serves on the Bow Fire Department, called and told him the church was on fire.
The family went to see, and Katie, Bardwell’s wife, still has the pictures saved on her phone showing flames billowing out of the steeple as smoldering bits simmered on the roof below.
Dick Stevens, a retired veteran who is longtime Bow resident and church member, was in Laconia with his wife, Alna, when they heard about the fire. They spend their summers at the N.H. Veterans Association on Weirs Beach but came back to Bow the next day to see the damage.
“It was very painful but I was so grateful that it was not just a cellar hole,” he said. “A lot of kudos should go to the Bow Fire Department.”
Stevens, who said the congregation has long sought to address the issues with the steeple, showed a smile as he stood with Alna watching the steeple drop into place.
“This must have been God’s plan because this is a much better job than we ever could have gotten,” he said.
(Nick Stoico can be reached at 369-3321, nstoico@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @NickStoico.)