About

When Reverend Joseph B. Lapsley founded the Bowling Green Presbyterian Church in 1819, the nearest established church was Caney Fork in Butler County. Ordained ministers of the denomination had visited the Three Springs area to conduct services, but none had remained. Several rural Cumberland Presbyterian congregations had formed following the fervor of the Second Great Awakening in the early 1800s, but none existed in the village of Bowling Green. Lapsley gathered the local Presbyterians (many of whom were relatives and friends from Rockbridge County, Virginia) and soon built a church in the public burying ground [now called Pioneer Cemetery and located in the block bounded by College, Center, Fifth, and Sixth Streets.] Lapsley also taught school there but unfortunately lived only four years after the founding. Session records of the early years are sparse, giving no hint of how the church came to be in the cemetery and no indication of what happened to it. By the time the congregation's next full-time pastor arrived in 1831, the building was gone. Reverend Samuel Wilson Calvert (grandfather of popular Aunt Jane of Kentucky author Eliza Calvert Oberchain) immediately pulled together the fifty-odd members and managed to build a structure far ahead of its time architecturally and substantial enough to have survived occupation as a Union hospital during the Civil War, an 1895 fire in the steeple, two splits, three reunions, and multiple remodelings. In addition to raising the nearly $7,000 necessary to construct their sanctuary, Bowling Green Presbyterians supported an excellent female academy in the structure's basement until 1862.