PHIPPSBURG

Back in the day, Jean (Totman) Flink and her classmates held their elementary school graduation at the Phippsburg Congregational Church.

Flink grew up directly across from Squirrel Point Light and “three football fields away,” as she put it, from the Congregational Church. In 1938 her grandfather, Dr. Adelbert Williams, purchased a pew in the church. Flink’s parents, Thomas and Anita Totman, served as church treasurers. The Totmans had the minister over for Sunday dinner.

She was eldest of seven children.

“I can’t remember when the church wasn’t part of our lives,” Flink said. “We were church members, deacons, carpenters and did all those things. The boys, as they got older, repaired it. It was our responsibility, in a caring kind of way.”

In those days, Flink recalled, the Congregational Church was one of 15 in a town of around 2,000 people. Upwards of 60 people attended Sunday services during the months when the summer people were in town. During the winter months, the church wasn’t always open.

Flink remembers that there was a colony of summer homes for ministers at the time in New Meadows. They supplied the church with ministers.

“My mother used to contact the ministers,” she said. “We always wondered, ‘do we have enough money to pay the minister?’ My mother would pay the difference, God bless her.”

Totman is a pretty wellknown name in these parts — the town library and a beach are named after them. But support of the church wasn’t a “one-man show,” she emphasizes. The Rainey family was among others that kept the church going in those days. Priscilla Rainey was a prominent member, and her son, Leonard, attends services there today.

Flink and her classmates played the part of angels during Christmas plays.

After she left for Boston to attend Boston University in the early 1950s, the church was the site of another important event.

“I walked up to the church the day I was married, in 1958,” she recalled.

The Flinks moved from Boston to New York, but always returned to Phippsburg in the summertime, and attended church services. They returned to retire in 1997.

“People had just voted to keep the church open year-round,” she said.

Stan Welch, a retired minister, agreed to preside on Sundays. The current pastor, Mark Wilson, succeeded him in 2001.

“Phippsburg had changed,” Flink said. “It was a more attractive congregation — bigger, with a congregation of well over 100. There are at least 60 on Sunday.”

In 2007, the congregation built the Linden Tree Meeting House — named for the great English Linden Tree planted there in 1774 — next to the church.

All’s well at the Phippsburg Congregational Church, an affiliate of the United Church of Christ.

“A lot of people like Mark, as I do,” Flink said. “We’re getting a lot of young people, and a lot of people from other towns have found us. We’re very enthusiastic about it.”

The Phippsburg Congregational Church traces its roots back to July 4, 1765, when several members of the 1734 Presbyterian Church at Fort Noble — in what is now the Fiddler’s Reach Road area — withdrew. They erected a meetinghouse on what is now Arrowsic Island (then Georgetown) across the river and slightly north of our present meetinghouse.

The first meetinghouse was razed about 1795, and the present meetinghouse was completed in 1802. The church was remodeled to its present appearance in 1846, except for its plain glass windows, which were replaced with the current stained glass windows in 1909.

A painting depicting the appearance of the church before 1846 can be seen in the Phippsburg Historical Museum just down the road beside Totman Library.

lgrard@timesrecord.com