After Newry was built, its citizens held church services for a good while in the hall over the company store. When they petitioned the company to let them begin a building fund, the company agreed and went further by providing a building site near the center of the community and adding $1,500.00 to the small amount already collected to erect the church. Although the people were predominantly Baptist, the building was called a Union Church because all denominations were welcome. The original bell served for many years, ringing to summon people to worship and also at midnight on New Year's. For more than a thousand years, bells had distinct functions in worship, at the deaths of saints, on ships at sea, on railway engines, on street cars, and to call farmhands in from plantations, yet the church bell retained a distinction of its own.