No one in that wooden building could have imagined the transformation that would eventually overtake the town or how that simple service would lead to a vibrant church with a rich history 175 years later.

It goes back to a time when there were only mud roads and pioneer wood buildings. It was in one of those wooden buildings - a rough school structure that stood on the present location of the Oakville Public Library that 11 - or 12 - residents gathered in April of 1833 to hear a service conducted by Rev. Edwards Marsh, a Presbyterian minister who travelled here on horseback from Hamilton. He rode into a community that had been carved out of a tract of 960 acres of virgin wilderness bought barely six years earlier by Oakville's founder, William Chisholm, following its legal surrender to the Crown by the Algonquin Indians.