Welsh Tract Baptist Church

In seventeen oh one, sixteen Baptists organized a congregation in Wales and then sailed for America together, landing in Philadelphia in seventeen oh one before settling the Welsh Tract in Delaware two years later. William Penn had granted their community a thirty-thousand-acre Welsh Tract, and they built a log church here in seventeen oh six, the first house of worship erected by European settlers in the greater Newark area. The current brick building went up in seventeen forty-six.

This congregation is recognized as the oldest Old School Baptist church in America, and every Baptist church that took root in Delaware grew from this one. On September third, seventeen seventy-seven, a cannonball from the nearby Battle of Cooch's Bridge, the only Revolutionary War engagement fought on Delaware soil, passed through the meeting house wall. The mark is still there.