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Caledonia Church — first raised as Caledonia Kirk in 1886 — is the oldest building in Lochdam and, by long tradition, its spiritual heart. Where Camber House is the town's psychological dark, the church has stood since the founding as its light.
The church was raised by Conan Barclay, the town's first minister and the only Scot of the founding era. He came out of Seattle around 1885, heard of the mining camp in Blue Rock, and built his kirk there the following year. It was Presbyterian in the Scottish-Welsh tradition, but it was also his own peculiar creation: Celtic knotwork carved into the timber, imported glass in the windows, and a Celtic cross of wood upon the roof.
Barclay was, to the townsfolk, a beloved and central figure — an eccentric mystic who kept rites for both heaven and earth. He was captivated by the two hawks that wheeled above Blue Rock, one brown and one black, which he named Apollo and Ares, and he spent his life trying to understand how they were bound to the older world that had lived in these mountains long before the church came. It was Barclay, too, who in 1910 won the town its name — Lochdam Town.
Caledonia saw Lochdam through its hardest passages. When a train came down the mountain in 1899, the dead were laid in a mass grave in the churchyard. Through the Depression, soup lines formed at its doors. And in the war years, it held services for the soldiers who filled the town. In 1942 an autumn storm broke the old Celtic cross from the roof, and it was never raised again; a modern cross took its place, and the name was quietly modernised from Caledonia Kirk to Caledonia Church.
For all its plain Sunday face, Caledonia keeps a longer memory than its sermons. What Conan Barclay carried with him across the ocean, and what has never left the building since, is sealed — pending release.