OK, since I'm in a storytelling mood and am besides that somewhat shocked and elated to see that old "family church" is still with us, here is our history with the Kresson Baptist Church.
My family once owned the Baptist Curch in Kresson that now houses the "Masterpiece Crafts" local artisan outlet on route 73 at Kresson Road, across from Kresson Lakes. I'm a little fuzzy (at 55 I guess that's normal) about when my father acquired the building, but it must have been in 1960 or 1961, because I remember going there during the summer after fifth grade (1960-61). My father (Francis Leo Barry, b. 1918 in Orange, NJ) was in the municipal supply business--he sold everything from road signs to street sweeper brooms (big heavy cast iron things), and his customers were local and statewide municipalities. A major source of income was selling and installing one-off street signs--we installed many of the original street signs in the then fledgling development called Cherry Hill (pre-Cherry Hill Mall). He originally had a warehouse in Gibbsboro which was convenient for him because he was a member of the Gibbsboro-based Square Circle Sportsmans Club (which I see still exists) and he liked to practice his archery after work every spring and summer day. The Gibbsboro site proved too small so he went warehouse shopping, and one day he announced that he was going to buy an old church in Marlton. I'm sure there were lots of reasons why he liked the site and the building (he always had an appreciation for antiques and history and especially for historical antiques and buying a 1860's church was perfect for him), but one was that it was truly in the country and he could shoot out back against a hay bale backstop. The building was also much larger than the Gibbsboro warehouse, and I imagine that the mortgage was probably less than the rent in Gibbsboro. At any rate, suddenly we found ourselves the "proud" owners of a very dilapidated old country church (a year or two later he bought an ancient fire truck that he kept alongside the church for awhile, and I guess we were probably the only family in Haddonfield New Jersey that simultaneously owned a church and a fire truck).
We worked on weekends (and my father worked every day) to bring it up to snuff--well I remember walking the rafters with my brothers and sister to clean up pigeon nests, removing weeds by hand, installing shelves inside and out. The pews were already long gone--as a woodworker I think wistfully about the potential those pews might have had, both historically and (if they insisted on junking them) as very well-seasoned hardwood. After a couple of months of steady work the warehouse was ready, and National Supply and Equipment (Frank Barry, prop.) moved into its Marlton location. My father used the extended room in the back as his office, and I remember very clearly coming to work with him during the summer and talking to him in that room (in a Catholic church it would have been the sacristy). We also would sometimes visit on school holidays--my mother would get hoagies at the deli if it was raining (I don't know if they still do but rain and hoagies just seemed to go together) and we'd sit in that little room with the rain pouring down the window, to the sound of the sizzling radiator. I also often fished in the channel cut on the same side of Rte. 73 as the church, over by Braddock Mills Road, the outflow from Kresson Lakes. It was a great place for bullheads and snapping turtles, but I also remember catching eels and I think bass as well. I was a budding naturalist and scientist and I wandered all around looking for small creatures (especially reptiles and amphibians), and I remember that the side roads off Braddock Mills were treasure troves of habitat and wildlife.
When I was a freshman in high school (1964-65) my father woke up one morning in April with a massive, crippling headache and was dead a couple of hours later of a cerebral hemmorhage, at age 46 (he was a WWII vet and is buried in Beverly National Cemetery, Beverly NJ). Unlike my father, my mother was not from New Jersey, she was from southern California, and by that provenance she even then was something of a stranger in a strange land. She was confronting a number of realities, particularly that my father had recently cancelled his life insurance policy, and that she was about to experience widowhood at age 38 with three children age 11-14, no employment history past 1948, and no college to speak of. She decided that we would have a better future in California and so she sold our house in Haddonfield and we left New Jersey on November 23, 1965 (my birthday, also my father's birthday). We settled with my grandmother in southern California, I eventually went north to UC Davis and became a biologist and herpetologist and here I am 41 years later with grown children and grandchildren. My father's business went into foreclosure because of debts he owed to suppliers, and during the summer of 1965 they cleaned out the church and went away with everything but the church itself, which was not considered part of the business. My mother later said that it was a blessing in disguise because even though we lost whatever we might have been able to get for the stock, she would have had to try to sell it in a market that she knew nothing about. She decided to hang on to the church, and indeed she rented it (I believe also to warehouse businesses) until finally she sold it in December 1976. My mother passed away in 1999 at 73.
For our family, the church was much like having a very elderly and very interesting relative always in the house, but someone whose demands were actually much less than than one might assume given that he was OLD and had lots of character. To know that the long lost relative lives and seems still to thrive after so many decades is a source of great satisfaction.
Thanks
Sean Barry
So much has changed in the world since then and one of the best things is having this technology to bring together sentiments and memories that could have faded forever. Let's hope we can generate some momentum towards another reunion.