After standing more than 150 years at what is now the northeast corner of Hwy. Located at 441 and Pea Ridge Road, and closed during the COVID pandemic in 2020, the Rooty Creek Primitive Baptist Church is no more.
The church, with records dating back to the Civil War, was torn down last week to make way for what’s expected to be a new, metal-framed worship structure. Construction should begin this year, though no timeline is readily available.
For Putnam County’s Charles Hurt, the loss of a small, aging, collapsing church is not just the loss of a building but of a living record of family, faith, and community history stretching back over parts of three centuries.
Hurt’s great-great-grandfather, Alford Hurt, was a minister at the church around the turn of the 20th century, he said in an interview more than two years ago.
Born in 1846 and dying in 1945, Alford Hurt left a 99-year legacy that extended through two sons who later served as elders at Rooty Creek Church. Generations of the Hurt family worshipped there, Charles Hurt said in a 2023 interview, including himself as he recalled attending Rooty Creek as a child, often with his grandmother.
“I have a lot of memories here, and I just don’t want to see it go away,” he said at the time. “It just feels wrong.”
Both white and Black parishioners worshipped together over the decades at Rooty Creek Baptist, Hurt stressed, something he called “a significant factor” and worthy of saving.
Regardless, a lone worker was busy last Monday morning, tearing into what’s left of the historic structure, pulling apart 2X4s mixed with insulation and ceiling tiles to create a pile of rubble, soon to be carted away to a landfill. Pews where parishioners once sat and sang hymns and witnessed weddings and memorials were strewn haphazardly, while the plain, nondescript pulpit lay in ruins at the opposite end of the debris.
Whatever remained of the walls, the Rooty Creek church reflected many decades of change, including mid-20th-century faux-wood paneling that replaced earlier wooden finishes.
Charles Hurt once held hope the original Rooty Creek Baptist Church might have been saved or even brought back to its original glory, but now a new church is expected to rise in its place, where locals will again pray and worship in its space, though for many, it will never be Rooty Creek again.