Oregon State Archives: A 1940 Oregon Coast Tour

The road turns southward, passing the GRAY MEMORIAL CHAPEL, (R.) 11.2 m. [Southbound from Astoria] on the site of an early Presbyterian church. Worshipers belonged to a congregation organized in 1846 by the Rev. Lewis Thompson and other early settlers. W.H. Gray, one of the founders, wrote the first local history of Oregon, published in 1869. The chapel erected by his daughter is a square brick structure with a very long and somewhat lower brick wing. The roof of the main unit rises to a square bell tower topped by a steeple. The pedimented entrance portico has walled sides and a recessed entrance between tall columns.

Ralph Friedman, Oregon for the Curious

...reached by a very narrow lane -- Gray Memorial Chapel, better known as Clatsop Plains Pioneer Church, because bldg. is on site of the first Presbyterian church, erected in 1850 as outgrowth of Presbyterian Society organized in 1846. Congregation, whose early member included William H. Gray, pioneer missionary, compatriot of Marcus Whitman, and author of probably the most controversial history of Oregon, claims to be oldest continuing Presbyterian church W of the Rockies. Present bldg. has original 1850 pulpit.

Clatsop Plains Pioneer Presbyterian Church: History

William Henry Gray, a lay worker, came west with the Whitman party in 1836. He participated in the meeting of settlers at Champoeg in 1843, when they voted to join the United States. In 1845 the Grays moved to Clatsop Plains. Rev. Lewis Thompson had arrived a year earlier. Opposed to slavery, he had freed the slave's on his father's Kentucky estate and moved to Missouri, where his abolitionist views were no better appreciated.

On September 19, 1846 Gray asked Thompson to conduct services in the Gray home for their friends and neighbors. Four years later the young church needed a building of its own, which Gray, a cabinet maker, built on land donated by one of the congregation, Robert Morrison. This building was destroyed by volent winds in 1873 a a second building was built in its place. This was in turn replaced by the present church in 1929.

The pulpit which, is still in use, was constructed in 1850 by another member of the congregation, Robert S. McEwan, from a log that had washed up on the beach.

The bell that calls congregants to services originally belonged to the Alderbrook Presbyterian Church. When that church was disbanded after World War II the bell was presented to Pioneer Presbyterian by Chester Bell.

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