WELCH TRACT CHURCH, The, Sylvester Hassell The Welsh Tract Church, whose meetinghouse is two miles from Newark, in New Castle County, Delaware, is the oldest Old School Baptist Church in the United States, and the only American Baptist Church that was regularly organized in Europe before emigrating to this country. It was constituted, in the spring of 1701, by sixteen Baptists in the counties of Pembroke and Caermarthen, in south Wales, with Thomas Griffith, one of their number, as their pastor.
A “Church Emigrant,” they embarked at Milford Haven in June, 1701, and landed at Philadelphia, September 8th, 1701. They first settled about Pennypack, near Philadelphia, where they continued about a year and a half, and where their membership increased to thirty-seven. Then they procured land in Northern Delaware from Messrs. Evans, Davis and Willis, who had purchased upwards of 30,000 acres of William Penn, called the “Welsh Tract,” and in 1703 they removed to that location, and built, near Iron Hill, a small meetinghouse, which stood until 1746, and was then succeeded by the present substantial stone house of worship.
In the yard around the house the bodies of many of the pastors and members, who during almost two centuries, have met and joined here in the service of God. The Welsh tract Church was one of the five original churches that, in 1707, formed the Philadelphia Baptist Association (the oldest Baptist Association in America), and for many years it was the most influential member of that body.
The Philadelphia Confession of Faith, published by this Association in 1742, was the old London Confession of 1689, with two other Articles, added principally through the influence of the Welsh Tract Church—Article 23., Of Singing of Psalms (in Public Worship), and Article 31., Of Laying on of hands (on all Baptized Believers).
Until 1732 the Church Book was kept in the Welsh language; and for about seventy years the pastors were of Welsh extraction. The Welsh are the most conservative people in Europe, their language and customs having undergone no radical changes for some twenty centuries. Mr. David Benedict speaks, in strong terms, of “The order, intelligence and stability of the Welsh Baptist Churches in America, and their sound, salutary and efficient principles.”
The pastors of Welsh tract Church have been as follows; Thomas Griffith, Elisha Thomas, Enoch Morgan, Owen Thomas, David Davis, John Sutton, John Boggs, Gideon Farrell, Stephen M. Woolford, Samuel Trott, William K. Robinson, Thomas Barton (from 1839 to 1870, when he died, after having been sixty years in the ministry), G.W. Staton, William Grafton and Joseph L. Staton, the present pastor. The church owns a residence and tract of land, which the pastor occupies.” (Hassell’s History ppg 554, 555)