Two for the Price of One, Part 2

Religious Society Church

Date Visited:  August 25, 2019

Stop:  #54

 It has been awhile since we posted our last blog, and I apologize for that.  I was the victim of a major technological disaster.  I had started writing this blog 4 weeks ago and had half of it written when I decided to call it a day.  I came back the next day and was downloading some photographs off of my phone when all of a sudden, the computer completely locked up.  I was able to shut the computer down, but when I tried to start it up again, I got the black screen of death and an error message stating that the operating system could not be found.  My hard drive had crashed!!!  The next day, I took the laptop in to a tech specialist, and found out that all the data on the hard drive could not be extracted.  I lost everything – all my photo files, all my blog documents and slides, my maps with all the correct historical marker locations - everything.  I had the hard drive replaced and remembered that I had backed-up my data back in April, so I was excited to know that at least some of my data could be retrieved.  But, for the second day in a row, technology would fail me.  The backup had failed and no data had been transferred.  I was devastated and it took me several days to get over that.  I actually thought about giving up on the blog, but over the past 3 weeks, I have spent countless hours reconstructing all my files and creating all my photo files and recreating all my maps.  I am finally all the way back to where I was (for the most part), and ready to get back to writing our blogs.

Having visited the Ray Township District No. 1 School, we knew the Religious Society Church was just across the parking lot, so after snapping a couple more photographs, I headed across the lot to find the historical marker for the church.  Fortunately, Kathy was astute enough to check the backside of the Ray Township District No. 1 School marker and noticed that the marker also doubled as the marker for the Church as well.  It’s not uncommon to have a two-sided sign with a different topic on each side – we have blogged about several so far.  What makes this marker unique is that it has two different Historical Marker Identification numbers.  Two, for the price of one!

The First Religious Society of Ray was organized on February 16, 1869 and included 5 members.  The church was built in December of 1869 on land donated by Arad Freeman, one of the members of Ray’s founding families.  The church was originally known as the Ray Union Church.  The original church building had a steeple and the building design was very similar to the neighboring Mill School.  The church was officially dedicated on June 22, 1872 and the name officially became the First Religious Society of Ray on February 16, 1887.  The Society disbanded early in 1950, and on February 8 of that year, the Township of Ray purchased the church for $1.00.  On June 6, 1950, the Ray Township Board agreed to rules governing the use of the former church building as the new Township Hall.  Later that same year, the original church belfry was removed.  The former Ray Union Church was listed on the Michigan Register of Historic Places, Site No. 1389, on March 19, 1987.  The State of Michigan historic marker was erected at the site on February 28, 2002.  The marker was purchased with donations of $1,635 from local businesses.  Today, the building serves as the Ray Township Senior Center, and it also houses some municipal offices.

There was so much history in this one spot, so I really enjoyed it.  But our next stop would be to one of the more popular historical sites in Ray Township, so it was time to move on.

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