Seneca County Mennonite Church (Bloomville, Ohio, USA)
Seneca County Mennonite Church (Mennonite Church), (now extinct), founded by Troxel families from Frederick County, Maryland, and Stark County, Ohio, by Hunsicker families from Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, and by other land-hungry immigrants from eastern states and even from Germany ca. 1825-40, who erected a hewn log meetinghouse at an early date on the farm of George Muckley 2½ miles east of Bloomville. Shortly before his death in 1842, Muckley deeded the acre on which the church and cemetery stood to "Henry Troxel, Jacob Rothgabe and Isaac Boren (Rohrer) and the Manomenist Congregation of Bloom Township." Early members of the congregation bore the names Troxel, Legron, Brandt, Detweiler, Newcomer, Bachman, Rothegabe, Allderffer, Muckley, Bowman (pronounced Bauman), Kroft (Kraft?), Zutavern, Behm, and Lehman. Bishops (nonresident) were Henry Stemen followed by John M. Brenneman, the latter serving until the Wisler controversy arose in 1871; ministers, David Martin and Isaac Rohrer. Even before Martin died and Rohrer followed his brother Abraham Rohrer, of Medina County, into the Wisler branch, the congregation declined. Denied Sunday-school privileges the young people united with the German Reformed or the Methodist Church. The last services were held in 1879 about the time that Isaac Rohrer and his wife moved to the Wisler congregation in Mahoning County, Ohio. The church building was sold and razed in 1888. Many of the later burials in the cemetery were exhumed and reinterred in the Woodlawn cemetery west of Bloomville. A few of the remaining members returned to the older Wisler congregations in western Wayne, Medina, and Mahoning counties. Unlike other extinct Mennonite congregations in Ohio, Seneca County supplied few if any accessions to Mennonite congregations in Indiana.
Umble, John. "Extinct Ohio Mennonite Churches." Mennonite Quarterly Review 18 (1944): 186-92 and 225-37.
|Author(s)||John S Umble|
Cite This Article
Umble, John S. "Seneca County Mennonite Church (Bloomville, Ohio, USA)." Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. 1959. Web. 22 Oct 2017. http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Seneca_County_Mennonite_Church_(Bloomville,_Ohio,_USA)&oldid=143744.
Umble, John S. (1959). Seneca County Mennonite Church (Bloomville, Ohio, USA). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Retrieved 22 October 2017, from http://gameo.org/index.php?title=Seneca_County_Mennonite_Church_(Bloomville,_Ohio,_USA)&oldid=143744.
Adapted by permission of Herald Press, Harrisonburg, Virginia, from Mennonite Encyclopedia, Vol. 4, pp. 500-501. All rights reserved.
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