This photo of the Bonlee Baptist Church congregation was provided by Kim Beal, who also provided the following information about the church.

Bonlee Baptist was organized in 1912, and the church was constructed in 1914 at a cost of $1200 by a firm out of Sanford. So based on that, naturally, the picture is 1914 or after. It may be around that actual time, and that may very well be what this picture was all about, posing with the new church.

The Sunday school addition to the right is not showing in this picture. If there is a record of when it was added on, we could get even closer on the time of this photo.

Those windows were still being opened during warm weather in the early to mid-1970s.

My Great Grandfather James Atlas White was a carpenter, and he helped build it. My great aunt Blanche Phillips (his daughter) told me that he would come home each evening and tell about the construction that took place daily. She said he told her he could see Mt. Vernon Springs from atop the steeple. He passed away in 1920, along with four other men from the community from drinking bad water.

I grew up in this church. There were a lot of good people from the early families of Bonlee still attending here at that time. Ina Dunlap Andrews was one of those people. She often spoke of the early days of Bonlee. Her father Isaac Dunlap and his brother John Dunlap were the founders of the town. They built the town, the Bonlee and Western Railroad, the feed mill, and John donated land and loaned $10k dollars to build the first school which was chartered in 1914. I remember a small wooden sign that was out front of the drive at the entrance when I was a student there that read “Bonlee School founded 1914.”

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