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Clear
Creek Church:
A Historic Landmark in Camp Verde
Clear
Creek Church is more than 100 years old, but its simple beauty
endures. The small
airy church, with its many windows and peaked roof, is located
about three miles outside of Camp Verde’s business district. It
sits in an open field, which looks much the way it did when the
church was first built.
Accounts
of the day describe how the community gathered to construct the
hand-hewn church in February 1898. Farmers led wagon trains to
haul rock from a nearby quarry in White Halls, close to Hayfield
Wash. Then the men cut the rock to order, supervised by an expert
stone mason, and erected the church’s walls in one day.
In the
cornerstone of the building they placed a bible and a $5 gold
piece (which was chiseled away in the 1920s). The women prepared a
celebratory picnic and served a buffet on an improvised table made
from boards and sawhorses.
Inside,
the church was simply adorned. The most notable feature was a
white organ built by Farrand Votey in Detroit, Michigan, for the
1893 Chicago World’s Fair, where it was exhibited.
Clear
Creek Church has gone through many incarnations since its
beginning. After
being Camp Verde’s only church until 1913, it was transformed
into the city’s one-room schoolhouse, where generations of local
children studied for a quarter of a century.
In 1938 the church was called into service to be a cannery
for World War II. Eight years later it was abandoned.
The
Burgbacher family purchased the building. In December 1974 Ralph
Burgbacher donated it and the organ to the Camp Verde Historical
Society. The society raised nearly $20,000 to lovingly restore the
historic church with reclaimed wooden floors, a wooden ceiling, a
pulpit and 14 pews and prayer benches.
More than
200 people came to the reopening ceremony in 1979, including then
Arizona Governor Bruce Babbitt. In
the 1980s the Burgbacher family purchased the original church bell
and donated it to the Camp Verde Historical Society. A new belfry
was completed in 1997. World-renowned
sculptor John Soderberg, a Camp Verde resident, built a bronze,
three-dimensional memorial plaque to honor the family. The plaque
sits outside the church’s front door.
Today Clear Creek Church, which is looked after
by the Camp Verde Historical Society, is rented out for special
events, especially weddings and memorials. It can comfortably seat
75 people. For more
information, call 928-567-5960.
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