Greenfield Covenant Church gets new steeple 

Anyone lucky enough to be driving down Slip Road in Greenfield at just the right moment last week might have been startled to see a brand new church steeple dangling in the air above the Greenfield Covenant Church.

The steeple, now affixed to the rear of the church over the altar, was funded almost completely by donations in memory of Kathleen Osgood, late wife Rev. Dr. Daniel Osgood, who has been the pastor of the Greenfield Covenant Church for 37 years.

“This is very special and very meaningful for me, because it is a lasting legacy to Kathy,” Osgood said. “She was very enthusiastic about the steeple project, very excited about it.”

The new steeple, which is fiberglass, arrived by flatbed truck last week.

“Who knew you could mail order a steeple?” Osgood laughed. “Well, it turns out you can, all the way from Alabama. You can even get a ‘steeple -in-a-box,’ for a very tiny church!”

Osgood said the Alabama Steeple Company recommended the height of the steeple be equal to the height of the building. The Covenant Church’s steeple is about 29 feet tall, with a cross on top. The last step in completing the steeple will be to install electricity, enabling the steeple to be lit from dusk until dawn. Greenfield electrician Ed Bergeron of Wired Electric is donating his services to the church.

Volunteers from the congregation were on hand to lift the top portion of the steeple off the flatbed, but when the bottom portion proved too heavy to lift, church member Wayne Laclare went home and got his tractor. Another volunteer, Andy Grant, who runs a tree service, brought his crane to lift the steeple to the top of the building.

“The guys put it together, and then we lifted it up, and then we bolted it down. It really changes the look of the building. Everyone says it looks like a church now,” Osgood said.

The plan for a new steeple has been in the works for several years as the Covenant Church has settled into its new home on Slip Road. In 2009, after the congregation’s 50-year lease for the second floor sanctuary space in the Greenfield Meetinghouse expired, Osgood and his church approached the Greenfield Selectboard about purchasing the Meetinghouse, but the town was not interested in selling. The Meetinghouse, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as the oldest meetinghouse in New Hampshire used by both church and state, is used by the town for elections and Town Meeting. Osgood and the church leaders, who needed more room for offices, the food pantry, and a charitable shop, began looking around for other spaces. At that time, Osgood was the chaplain for Crotched Mountain Foundation campus.

“I asked if we could hold services up there in the auditorium for maybe two years … they were supportive and said yes, and I never dreamed we would hold services up there for ten years,” Osgood said.

While the congregation met at Crotched Mountain Foundation, Osgood and his church looked around for a permanent home. They purchased the former office on Slip Road in 2019 and began to transform the building, adding the portico and the chapel space and altering rooms to meet the needs of the church.

“This building makes a lot of sense for us. We can afford it,” Osgood said. “A lot of congregations in New England are struggling with these big old buildings, and they just can’t keep up. The estimate we got in 2009 when we looked at purchasing the Meetinghouse was for over a million dollars, and it was like, forget it,” Osgood recalled.

Osgood was recently invited to return to the Crotched campus to serve as the chaplain for the Seven Hills New Hampshire.

“I’ve been very blessed,” he said.