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Final service for farming area

THE weatherboard Uniting Church at Horfield will close for the last time after a worship service on Sunday.

It will bring an end to 134 years of formal worship in the farming community near Cohuna.

A dwindling and ageing district population of devoted Christian worshippers has forced the congregation to close the church.

The final service at 10.30am on Sunday will occur four months after a thanksgiving service that attracted former residents, including former minister, the Rev. Allan Searle, who served there between 1958 and 1963.

Large station properties were being broken up to create smaller family farms when the district’s first church was built.

The Congregational Church was founded by Rev. J. Barber in 1879 and four years later a mud brick church was built in an area between Mansfield’s Bridge and the Macorna irrigation channel.

A new church was built in 1914 after a flood devastated the mud brick building. The current weatherboard church has stood since 1957.

The Horfield congregation is part of a cluster of Uniting Churches at Cohuna, Leitchville and Gunbower.

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