First Old School Baptist Church of Roxbury and Vega Cemetery

Along County Route 36 in the Catskill hamlet of Vega, a small white meeting house and an adjoining burial ground mark the home of the First Old School Baptist congregation of Roxbury. The front-gabled, wood-framed church was built in 1856 and shows restrained Greek Revival detail: a plain entablature, corner pilasters and a pedimented west facade. Inside are a shallow vestibule with curved gallery stairs, a plain meeting room, a U-shaped gallery and simple bench pews. The nearby creek served for baptisms by immersion. The Vega Cemetery holds early nineteenth-century marble stones and graves of congregation elders and members of the wider community. The congregation traces its origin to a Baptist church organized in 1796, reputedly the first in the town, and later aligned with the Old School faction opposed to centralized missionary organization. The district is recognized for preserving a nearly unaltered rural religious setting.