(from a Scrapbook)
(Title and Date, Missing)
*TWO GERMAN CHURCHES NEAR RIXFORD’S CORNERS
NOT FAR FROM LAFARGEVILLE, N. Y.
LAFARGEVILLE -- A mile east from Rixford’s corners, once a considerable hamlet on the Stone Mills road, stands a weather beaten church, long abandoned, recalling the years when the German settlers in Orleans worshiped in the faith of their great national religious leader.
Altho without the boundaries or what was known as Rixford’s corners, it embraced that community, and much more, in its parish. It was the German Lutheran church of the region. Half a block away if one may use metropolitan measurements in the rural district, stood the church of the German Methodists. Its foundations are traceable in a mass of shrubs and rank grass.
There was no settlement adjoining these places of worship. The Lutheran church stands near the intersection of three highways. The Methodist building was not far distant from a four corners.
Between these denominations existed full co-operation. They joined in maintaining the cemetery, on a more traveled highway to the south. Its monuments reveal that it was widely used in the eighteen forties and fifties, and even into the present century, but now less attention seems to be given it. The back is overgrown with locust bushes and a burrowing woodchuck has dug up the metal handle of a casket.
The Lutheran church has not been used for religious purposes in 20 years. It was sold to the owner of the adjacent farm and was converted to a storehouse by installing large doors on the ground level. Unpainted and showing the attacks of the weather, it retains its tower, topped by the weather vane and compass markings that long identified it.
Site for the Methodist church, known in the vicinity as “the lower site,” is said to have been donated by LeRay de Chaumont.
*NOTE: In the absence of a title, one has been assigned by the typist.