It’s a simple but beautiful white country church on a hill in Minot. The old church is now used just one month a year in the summer and on one special night in the winter. Nevertheless, this building has ties to world events that speak to us today.

My wife and I attended the annual after-Christmas evening service at the Center Minot Congregational Church two nights ago. It’s heated by one wood stove and weekly services there in the winter are not practical, except for one night.

This year, the event fell on New Year’s Day – a day when people everywhere are looking hopefully ahead to peace and prosperity.

William C. Ladd, resident of Minot in the early 1800s, was very familiar with that church. He lived on a large farm just across the road, and he often preached a philosophy of peace to his neighbors. It was a message he also took beyond Maine.

Ladd was born in Exeter, N.H., in 1778. He went to Harvard and then embarked as a sailor on one of his father’s vessels. He became a skillful navigator and captain of some of the finest ships that sailed from New England ports until he left the ocean at the beginning of the war of 1812.

It was in the years soon after that when he bought land in Minot and took up a lifelong cause for which he became known as “the Apostle of Peace.”

Regional peace societies sprang up following the War of 1812, and Ladd influenced the Maine Peace Society and others to merge and become the American Peace Society. He was its president for many years.

At his home in Minot, Ladd authored and published essays in the cause of peace. His ideas were as controversial in his day as they would be today. He carried his views to the extent of denying the right of defensive war.

Ladd was one of the first to propose a Congress of Nations and a World Court, and the American Peace Society was instrumental in bringing about many peace congresses at The Hague, beginning in 1843, and in the United States in 1907-1915, as well as the Pan American Congress, out of which grew the Pan American Union.

Ladd’s views were important precursors to the League of Nations and to the United Nations.

Eda Tripp of Minot, a historian with a vast knowledge of Ladd’s life and accomplishments, was among the several dozen church members at Sunday’s service, as well as people who have lived recently in the Ladd homestead.

Hope for peace was very much on the minds of those in that Minot church. Pastor Frances Lord said her grandson, a soldier in Iraq, had narrowly missed injury or death a few days ago when his vehicle passed by a roadside bomb that failed to explode. She noted that another bomb in Iraq did explode, and its impact also was felt close to home. Sgt. 1st Class Shawn C. Dostie, whose mother lives in the Lewiston area, was killed by a bomb in Baghdad on Dec. 23.

At the end of the service, the congregation went out into the cold night to the pealing of the church’s old bell. In the quiet Minot countryside that was once known as Bakerstown, and from which old Auburn was set out, the bell’s tolling reached across distance and time – far and wide, into the past and the future.