The afternoon sun shines Friday on the Albany Evangelical Church at First Avenue and Pine Street.
By the time the bike took me to the east end Friday for another look at the Albany Evangelical Church, it was far too late for the main event.
That event took place Friday morning. It was the removal of the congregation’s bell from its bell tower, where it had been since the building’s early days some 70 years ago.
The event that precipitated the bell’s removal happened in April. It was the sale of the property to another Albany church, the Jesus Pursuit Church, which has been operating out of the former Rubinstein’s furniture store on Santiam Highway for a number of years.
The purchase price was $1,450,000, according to the online records of the Linn County assessor. The sale covered the building at 1332 First Ave. S.E. and the block it shares with a three-bedroom house (the parsonage), and a parking lot of about 50 spaces. But Albany Evangelical is keeping the bell.
Julie Sams, a longtime member of Albany Evangelical, told me the bell came around the Horn in the 1800s, has a rich history with the church, and “has rung on Sunday mornings at this location since the 1950s.”
Albany Evangelical started construction at First and Pine in 1950. The basement was built first, and the congregation met there until the upper floors were finished about 1953.
I first wrote about the building in March 2022 after seeing it was for sale. The ad said it was an ideal site for development.
The building’s vast size, nearly 17,000 square feet of floor space, had grown much too large for the congregation. And this was during the COVID pandemic, when services had pretty much migrated to the Internet.
Linn County announced in July 2023 that it wanted to buy the property but dropped the idea by September.
With the building now sold, where will the congregation go?
“We are kind of nomads for a while,” Julie Sams told me in an email. “We have a few ideas/options for meeting places until we find a place to light more permanently. We will plan to meet in person and continue an online presence.”
The bell is in storage for the time being.
Removing it from the tower, Julie Sams says, “went smoother than anticipated.” She provided photos to show how it went. The photos are below. (hh)
Love it and the history!!
Where was the Rubenstein Furniture Store on Santiam Highway? I can’t place it.
Where the Jesus Pursuit Church is now. Behind Advance Auto Parts.
Isn’t it funny how next to it is a furniture store that was formally an auto parts store? ( Kenechts auto parts)
question:
why would a church sell if it had no new place set up? nomads with $1.4 mil to get a place should not need long or if not used to get a new place, who gets the $1.4 mil?
ok 2 questions
They plan on investing the money to pay to lease a place to meet for church services.
good ridance now i dont get woke up by that damm bell and entitled people thinking, just because they are attending church they can park and block my driveway
I’m a fan of keeping the historic parts with the building.
It was in the bell tower of the original First Evangelical Church of Albany, when the building was located on Lyon St. They removed it when they sold the building and began construction on the next building on Pine.
WOW what a rich history of the bell.
Well deserved sarcasm. I’ll try to catch up with the history when I get word that the bell is installed in a church again.