File:Randall Memorial Baptist Church, Amherst, New York - 20221209.jpg

English: Randall Memorial Baptist Church, 6301 Main Street, Amherst, New York, December 2022. Among the oldest extant religious congregations in Amherst, this is the third building Randall has called home and was constructed in two discrete phases. Seen in the background at left is the earlier of them, a $370,000 structure for which ground was broken in 1960 and which was completed in 1962. At the outset, it contained church offices, classrooms, and kitchen facilities as well as a large multipurpose auditorium that originally served double duty as a temporary worship space pending the completion of the second and more architecturally interesting phase of construction, that seen in the foreground at right: an enormous 850-seat climate-controlled sanctuary with lower-floor fellowship hall, choir room, and still more classrooms along with a tall, spindly bell tower: a work of the Buffalo-based architectural practice of Shelgren, Patterson & Marzec. Here, the firm resurrects in a Modernized version the Colonial Revival aesthetic that had served as its house style in decades past: contrasting with the sleek and often boxy angularity on the side elevations (note, for example, the windows lining the nave, the grillework in the belfry, and the needlelike spire) is a full-fledged mock temple front on the façade, where a quartet of Doric pilaster strips "support" a cut-stone entablature and Greek-style pediment complete with blind lunette. Interestingly, upon the dedication of this new sanctuary in 1970 after a two-year construction process, the older multipurpose space was converted to a gymnasium, a forward-thinking touch that accurately presaged the essential role youth outreach would come to play in the Baptist church of the future. Randall Baptist was founded in 1826 by a ragtag constituency of eighteen locals - a mix of recently evangelized newcomers courtesy of the traveling ministers who'd visited the village over the previous year and folks who'd been vexed by the inconvenience of attending other far-flung Baptist churches in what was then a sparsely populated frontier - and despite early struggles with low membership and frequent turnover of pastors, by 1840 managed to erect a purpose-built church on South Cayuga Street about a quarter-mile from Main Street as a replacement for the rented space in the Bowmansville schoolhouse where they'd earlier met. Incorporated originally under the name of the First Baptist Church of Christ in Amherst, the congregation gradually became more established and soon earned a reputation for itself as a champion of the abolitionist movement, with many members active as Underground Railroad stationmasters and the church's pastor, Rev. William Harrison Randall, personally recruiting and leading a Civil War battalion who fought with distinction at Gettysburg; the church was renamed in his honor after his death in 1874 due to the lingering aftereffects of the wounds he suffered in battle there. With the help of a trust fund set up by Rev. Randall's widow, the church prospered throughout the remainder of the 19th century, dedicating a larger building in 1904 whose impending replacement was apparently in the works as early as 1958, when local newspapers advertised it for sale.