Then & Now: Church camp at Haley's Crossing

Baman Stone came to Fryeburg, Maine, in 1873 to be minister of Fryeburg’s Congregational Church, but just four years later, he was “uninstalled” — or fired, in common parlance. Too liberal, would be my guess, especially since he went straight from that posting to found a congregation of Swedenborgians in the village.

Soon he had attracted a bigger following than the church that canned him, with a big new house of worship on Oxford Street. There he remained, permanently, and he was still “pastor emeritus” when he died in April of 1918, probably as one of the earliest victims of the Spanish flu; he had just returned from preaching to a superspreader crowd in Portland.