Old Scotch Church, Presbyterian church in Hillsboro, United States.
The Old Scotch Church is a white wooden Presbyterian church near Hillsboro, Oregon, built in the Carpenter Gothic style to a design by Mr. Balantyne. Its tall front gable carries a steep dark-shingled spire with three green-louvered windows and a round cross-patterned window below; a black cross tops the spire. A lower shingled roof slopes over the side wing, and the stained glass windows were imported from Scotland.
Construction finished in 1878 on land donated by Jacob Hoover, making this one of Oregon's oldest active places of worship. The congregation grew from Scottish immigrants who brought their church tradition from Aberdeenshire to this region.
The nickname "Old Scotch Church" comes from the twelve founding pioneers, who had belonged to the Free Church of Scotland in Aberdeenshire before settling together in the Tualatin Valley. Eight of those twelve founders lie in the surrounding cemetery, whose graves include that of the mountain man Joseph Meek.
The church stands in an unincorporated part of Washington County near Hillsboro, beside McKay Creek. Sunday services are still held in the 1878 building every week, so time a visit outside service hours to see the interior. The cemetery surrounding the church, where eight of the twelve founders are buried, can be walked among the graves.
A cairn added in 1985 in the cemetery commemorates ancestors massacred at Glen Coe in 1692, not survivors of it. Eight of the twelve founding pioneers are buried around the church, and Joseph Meek, mountain man and first U.S. Marshal of the Oregon Territory, was re-interred here after his homestead was sold.
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