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Downtown frame shop owner John Gregory rescued the historic church pulpit off the outside walks of Lighthouse Baptist Church Saturday, moving it inside a backroom in his studio to restore and preserve it for future generations.
Gregory, who owns Gregory Frame Shoppe at 800 Main St., said he was second in line of many who called church Pastor Bill Bryson to ask for the pulpit after a photo appeared in last Friday’s Pleasanton Weekly showing it sitting outside the church. Bryson agreed to let Gregory take the pulpit since it would be saved as an historic community piece.
Gregory said no one is sure how old the pulpit is, whether it was built back in the late 1800s when the church was built or, more likely, in the 1930s when the church was renovated. The church, located at 118 Neal St. at the corner of Second Street, was built in 1876 by Pleasanton Presbyterians, who sold it to the Baptists when Pleasanton Presbyterian Church was built on Mirador Drive in the 1970s.
Whether 80 years old or an 1876 platform, it has served for thousands of sermons and guest lectures dating back to when Pleasanton was a town of just a few hundred people.
“I saw the picture in the Weekly and went over and saw this pulpit,” said Gregory, as he stood behind it in a corner of a crowded art frame supply room behind his Main Street studio. “I want to refinish and restore it to its original appearance, and also place a plaque on it recognizing its construction date and how it’s been used.”
Lighthouse Baptist is remodeling its sanctuary and installing hardwood floors with a new floor plan for the sanctuary that does away with a pulpit entirely. The church moved the old pulpit to an outside courtyard in hope that someone would take it before it was sent to a junkyard.
The church appealed to the Museum On Main to take the pulpit because if its historic value to the Pleasanton community. But the museum passed on taking the pulpit for its collection because of the inability to pinpoint the installation date and the museum’s lack of adequate storage space, said Jim Allen, former Museum On Main board president and the museum representative who assessed the pulpit.
“We think maybe it’s the original, but it’s a big piece and we couldn’t find out, so it’s too big for us to store,” Allen said.
– Jeb Bing
– Jeb Bing