One-hundred-one-year-old Roscoe Anderson recalls that his first chore as a 5-year-old was to follow his father up and down furrows of their farmland, placing one grain of corn in each of his dad’s footprints.
“From that time on, I realized that was my occupation,” Anderson said. “I was a farmer.”
What he didn’t realize was just how God would put him to work as a farmer. Ultimately, Anderson would devote himself to preparing soil and planting seeds for God’s work in New England. Originally from Clarke County, he grew up in the early 1900s in a family of subsistence farmers with a strong Christian heritage. His parents, Thomas and Lola, named Roscoe after a pastor they had dearly loved.
Anderson said he came to a saving relationship with Jesus at about age 8 during a two-week revival. “I thought my heart would leave my body if I didn’t go forward,” he said.
His was the only decision for Christ during the revival services, but Anderson still remembers the church’s celebration over his salvation. “It had been a very dry year and the streams were pretty dry. A group of men took axes and shovels and made a pool out of a crater to baptize me,” he said.
It wasn’t long before the family moved to the Liberty community where Liberty Baptist Church was the center of nearly everything. Anderson attended school at the church whenever tuition could be scraped together.
At age 12, he supported his family by working in a sawmill; around age 14, he began working in the textile factory in Union. He married Daisy at age 18, and his role in World War II was on the horizon. Anderson was among several thousand civilians who resigned their jobs and enlisted in the Army Air Corps (now the U.S. Air Force) to help the British face the Germans. He spent the war years there helping modify British ships for war.
Those experiences, alongside military personnel who knew his work and recommended him, set Anderson on course for defense-related positions, even serving in research and development for various munitions projects. After the war he worked on projects with General Electric (GE), a military supplier. While based in Tampa, Fla., with Daisy and their two children, he traveled a lot, often to Vermont.
Anderson always looked for a place to worship on Sunday wherever he was, and he quickly noticed the absence of Southern Baptist churches in Vermont. “What impressed me most was that God put it on my heart to go to Vermont,” he said. “And it was the only state in the union without a Southern Baptist church.” When a position opened up to manage the GE firing range in Vermont, he was on his way.
Merwyn Borders, a former Southern Baptist missionary in New England and a historian for New England Southern Baptist churches, reflected on Anderson’s influence on Baptist work in Vermont. “The thing that stands out about Roscoe is that the first work in Vermont was started by laypeople, not missionaries,” Borders said. He described Anderson as “professional in his work, down to earth, with an ability to engage people and a desire to reach out.”
Susan Brindle, widow of Bob Brindle, an early pastor of the first Southern Baptist church in Vermont, said Anderson began in 1960 by putting an ad in the newspaper asking if anyone in the community might be interested in beginning a Bible study with the goal of becoming a church. “They began meeting in their rental home. That property became available to buy, and it became the first church building of the South Burlington Church,” she said.
The South Burlington Baptist Church, now known as New Covenant Baptist Church, reached only about 110 members at its peak but spawned 37 other churches in Vermont.
To all who know him, Anderson is fondly known as “Mr. Roscoe.”
Having entered a second century of life, his fervor for God and for His church still radiates brightly. In 2009, at age 99, Anderson retired from 30 years of teaching the 3-year-old Sunday School class at First Baptist Church, Starkville, Miss., where he currently resides near his children and grandchildren.
(BP)
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