The meetings of local
Baptists that became the church began in 1783 at nearby
Woodlawn Farm, the home of member Richard Wood, an early local settler. Eight years later, in 1791, the church was formally
incorporated and the following year another member, Joseph Hallock, gave land for the church to be built. It took the Brookfield name from the growing settlement. In 1828 the tower was added, with the stairs inside allowing more seating capacity within. Five years later, the church broke with
Mainstream Baptists and affiliated itself instead with the
Primitive Baptist movement, which the year before had rejected the
evangelical directions the denomination was taking in the
Second Great Awakening. Believing that eschewing foreign missions and
Sunday schools was more in line with early
Calvinism, they were also sometimes called the
Old School Meetinghouse of Brookfield. They kept Brookfield in their name even after the
postal service forced the hamlet to change its name to Slate Hill to avoid confusion with New York's other
Brookfield, in
Madison County. After the
Civil War stoves provided the building's first heat. Over the next few decades, the congregation began dwindling until its last member died in 1933. But trustees continued to hold the required annual meeting and maintain the building. In 2004, two members were added to the empty congregation by vote of the trustees, presiding pastor, and representative members from other Old School Baptist congregations. ==Aesthetics==