Question
Where is this commemorative stone? What does it mark? And what is significant about the date?
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Answer
This date stone is in Gifford, above the door of a building on Duns Road. Now a private house, going backwards in time it was was formerly a workshop, Gifford school, and the Free Church School of Gifford. The date, 1843, marks its construction and the year of the Disruption in the Church of Scotland when the Church split over the issue of who had the right to appoint the parish minister – the heritors (in Gifford the Marquis of Tweeddale) or the congregation.
As in many parishes, the Gifford minister and the great majority of the congregation left to form a Free Church. They met at first under canvas in a butcher’s yard but in a remarkably short time built their own church, opened in October 1843, St Andrews, (now converted to housing), a manse and this school, all in Duns Road. The Free school was much superior to the village school one of whose classrooms was under the steps leading to the hall and had little daylight. The schools merged in the 1870s in the Duns Road building.
The Disruption was a traumatic event, coming at a time when the church was central to local communities. The Factor reported to the Marquis, “It is most distressing to see what was want to be a large united congregation split up with two sections passing and repassing each other in the village”. Most Free Church congregations reunited with the Church of Scotland in 1921.
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