BOW, N.H. — When he was a kid, Allen Bardwell remembers ringing 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 last July.
He and his wife, Katie, and son, Nathan, joined about a dozen other 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 the steeple went up. “The steeple was getting to a point where it needed to be fixed. It was getting bad.”
A lightning strike last year sparked an intense blaze that fire crews managed to prevent from spreading to the rest of the nearly 200-year-old structure. The steeple was destroyed, and the interior below sustained heavy water damage.
Members of the congregation, as well as their pastor, the 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 money, these projects have been on hold for years.
Other members of the congregation agreed with Bardwell 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 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 Concord 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?”
The 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, Bardwell said.
“It’s the people who count, but the building in its own right has so much historical value,” he said.