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I can be something of a Peeping Tom.

That statement no doubt requires a bit of elaboration. I am not the sort of Peeping Tom who voyeuristically invades ladies’ boudoirs. There are times, however, when I cannot resist the urge to peek inside empty, old buildings.

While this may sound wholesome enough, it occasionally involves mild forms of trespassing. It is then that I fall back on the ancient journalistic wisdom that it is always better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

What can I say? I am a reporter. Being snoopy comes with the territory.

I know that the old Miller church and cemetery off of Oregon Route 213 just north of Silverton are on private land, and even though the property is on the National Register of Historic Places, I’m not sure whether prying eyes are welcome or not.

Regardless, the church building proved irresistible on a recent Saturday. I pulled over and stuck my face to the window.

What a strange church.

There is no altar or other traditional architectural features to suggest that it was ever used for regular worship services. It turns out there is a reason – a truly fascinating reason (at least if you are the curious and snoopy sort).

The little wooden church next to the cemetery is Oregon’s only “burying church” – and it comes with a great story.

Richard and Margaret Stanton Miller already had a large family when they moved to a square-mile land claim near the Abiqua River in 1847. Locals quickly started referring to Mr. Miller as “Uncle Dicky.”

He was a member of the 1850 territorial legislature and served as the chairman of the Marion County Commission. In 1857, Uncle Dickey was elected to represent the Silverton area on the Constitutional Committee charged with writing the Oregon Constitution.

Miller and his family moved to Scio in 1860, but not before deeding a three-acre plot of land “in consideration of the love and respect” to the people of what would become Silverton in 1885. The land was to be used for a church and cemetery. His only stipulation was that “said church be open and free to all religious denominations.”

That sounds like quite the progressive statement for 1860, but not when considering the remarkable history of Silverton.

Silverton was founded in the 19th century by people known at the time as “freethinkers” – the kind of people we refer today as “liberals” or “Portlanders.” The prevailing Portland residents at the time, however, were a particularly stuffy lot of buttoned-down businessmen who opposed women’s suffrage and thought Southern slavery was just fine, provided that blacks were kept out of the Northwest.

Meanwhile, the founding families of Silverton created such institutions as the Silverton Liberal Union. The Liberal University of Oregon was created by union members in 1896 with the motto “Universal Mental Liberty.”

The Miller structure is a burying church in that it was never designed to host weekly worship services. It was intended only for burial services before laying people to rest in the adjacent cemetery.

One of the people laid to rest there is Damon Smith, the cemetery’s first resident. He died on the property in 1852 – a full eight years before the land was deeded to the community. The church itself was not built until 1882.

Area residents chose a Greek Revival style (particularly popular in the 1840s) and used indigenous rock for the foundation. Despite the sturdy foundation, the building has a particularly slanted floor.

According to documents at the Marion County Historical Society, the site of the church was once a sort of 19th-century rest area for wagons coming south from Oregon.

Though designated as a burying church, the building accommodated services by a small congregation during the early 20th century. By the early 1970s, however, there was talk of moving the church.

According to Margot Miller, reporting for a local website in nearby Mount Angel, the church was saved by Silverton resident Barbara LeDoux. She contacted the Millers’ descendants and rallied them and various other interested parties in an effort to preserve the structure.

Pews from 1853 were scrubbed down, and the church was wonderfully restored.

Margot Miller reported that a committee – including several generations of the Miller family – works to maintain the church and holds an annual family golf tournament to raise money for its upkeep.

It is amazing the stories you find when your curiosity gets the better of you, and you poke your nose in where it may not necessarily belong. It is particularly appropriate to find stories in cemeteries because, as someone once told me, we’re all just stories in the end.

The point is to make them good ones.

“Building Curiosity” investigates intriguing, historical and obscure tidbits of the built environment. Tom Henderson is a reporter for the Daily Journal of Commerce. Contact him at 503-802-7226 or [email protected].