The centenary of the Darlington Point Presbyterian Church building will be celebrated again on Sunday with the exhuming of a time capsule buried in 1993.
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Although the church building does still stand at its old address at the corner of the Carrington Street and Hay Road, Darlington Point Club has been selected as a more comfortable location for the capsule to be opened and its contents examined.
The time capsule was buried at the church in 1993 to celebrate its centenary and will be dug up at 4pm on Sunday with members of the public welcome to attend.
The building was consecrated as a Presbyterian church in 1893 and was the first in town followed by the St Oliver Plunkett's Catholic Church in 1925.
After becoming a Uniting church in 1968 the building sadly ceased operation around 2008 due to a lack of membership.
Former Uniting Church parishioner Jeffery King said he is especially hoping to find old church documents buried with the capsule.
“Some prominent members of the congregation when the capsule was buried were the Minister Maurine Redenbach, the centenary coordinator Phil Naismith, congregation president Elvie Harris, secretary Melva Mitchell and elders John and Beryl Cattell,” Mr King said.
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Heritage Darlington Point secretary Mona Finley said “I remember the centenary when (the capsule) was put in the ground I was about 50.”
“It was a big whole-weekend gathering and they tried to more or less replicate the 1893 celebration when the church was opened with a community concert and people contributing singing and talking,” Mrs Finley said.
“In the vicinity of 300 or 400 attended at the time because the relatives of people attending made it a kind of returning home event,” Mrs Finley said.
According to Mrs Finley the church’s heyday would have been at the beginning of the 1900s with most of the parishioners being English and Scottish pastoralists.
Mrs Finley said many of those families started moving away following the end of the lamb industry and land resuming during the Coleambally Irrigation Scheme in the early 1960s.
“Plots were subdivided and allocated by a lottery,” Mrs Finley said.
“A lot of the older families left because larger farms were subdivided into smaller farms and new people came in.”
After closing in the mid 2000s, the church and its land were bought by Darlington Point resident Bruce Gowrie-Smith who said he was concerned at there being no plans in place to preserve the historic building.
Mr Gowrie-Smith said the building is made of locally cut timber and is likely the oldest in Darlington Point.
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