Take what you need — even the house

Raines Baptist Church has spent decades giving without asking much in return. Now the Dawson church is looking for someone to take its historic Orange Street house and give it a chance at a new beginning.

DAWSON — The old house at 577 Orange St. has spent much of its life being asked to become something different.

Its tall windows once illuminated rooms built for a vibrant domestic life. Years later, children crowded upstairs for preschool, Sunday school and youth programs. Downstairs rooms became fellowship spaces used for community programs. Then came boxes of clothing, diapers, household goods and furniture destined not for the people inside the house but for families throughout Dawson who needed them.

A small room at the rear became a food pantry. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the grounds outside became a drive-in sanctuary.

For more than three decades, the house beside Raines Baptist Church has been a classroom, storeroom, fellowship hall, relief center and an extension of the ministry led by the Rev. Raymond Andrews and his wife, Sharon.

Now the old giving house needs a favor in return.

Raines Baptist is looking for someone willing to take it — preferably someone equipped to move and preserve it — so the congregation can use the property beneath it for a larger sanctuary and community facility Andrews envisions serving children, students, senior citizens and adults.

The reality is that if no one steps forward, Andrews said, demolition eventually may become the church’s only practical option.

“I don’t want to tear it down,” he said as he walked through the second floor recently, stopping repeatedly to point out old windows, floors and surviving decorative woodwork. “I would love for someone to just take it.”

For Andrews, the difficulty is not simply architectural.

“We are so entrenched because we’ve been doing this for 30 years out of that house,” he said. “That house has been everything to us.”

The precise age and earliest ownership of the two-story frame house remain unsettled.

People familiar with the property say city records list a construction date of about 1900, although some believe its architecture suggests an earlier origin. Feeding the Valley and a 2024 Albany Herald report described the building as roughly 200 years old.

What the historical record does establish is that Orange Street was home to the prominent Raines family by the closing years of the 19th century.

An October 1896 edition of The Dawson News reported that a local real estate agent had sold Dr. A.M. Raines the Orange Street residence of Mrs. T.R. Hannah and that Raines planned to move to Dawson from Quitman County. Two years earlier, legal notices from the Hannah estate described a house and lot on the west side of Orange Street among property being sold after T.R. Hannah’s death. Whether that house was the structure now standing at 577 Orange St. has not been conclusively established.

The Raines family remained associated with Orange Street for decades. In 1911, The Dawson News reported that a son of the late A.M. Raines and his new wife would make their home with his mother on Orange Street. In 1918, the paper reported that Mrs. A.M. Raines had suffered a broken arm at her Orange Street residence.

The family was deeply embedded in Dawson’s civic and financial life.

A.M. Raines was a physician, lawyer, judge and public official whose activities regularly appeared in the local newspaper. When he died in 1908, an Atlanta newspaper described him as one of southwest Georgia’s best-known and most influential residents.

Later generations of the Raines family became closely associated with the Bank of Dawson and local government.

Church leaders said the Raines family also played a role in the history of the house and neighboring church — an oral history now being compared with surviving deeds, maps and newspaper records.

“This house is amazing,” Andrews said as he pointed to intricate woodwork remaining upstairs.

Time has taken a toll. Paint curls from the clapboard siding. Vines climb portions of the exterior. Some porch ornamentation has disappeared to rot and decay.

But much survives: elaborate pierced gable work, turned wooden details, rows of tall multipane windows, wide porches, brackets and decorative trim that speak to the craftsmanship invested in the property.

The house also stands inside the Dawson Historic District, which was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1997. The district encompasses much of Dawson’s historic residential and commercial core and contains architecture representing the city’s growth from the 19th into the early 20th century.

Orange Street itself reaches deep into Dawson history. National Register documentation records municipal activity along the street as early as 1858, only two years after Dawson was established. The nearby First Baptist Church at Church and Orange streets was built in 1892 and hosted the Georgia Baptist Convention the following year.

That First Baptist connection later became central to the story of Raines Baptist.

Andrews and his wife said Raines began as a mission associated with First Baptist Church.

The earlier mission eventually became inactive, and the old house was at one point divided into three rental sections, Andrews recalled. When he was later recommended and interviewed to lead the congregation, the property arrangement still reflected its ties to First Baptist.

The Andrewses were not from Dawson. They came after Raymond Andrews interviewed for the position, but what began as an assignment became a decades-long commitment.

By February 1996, the historical record already identified Raymond Andrews as pastor of Raines Baptist Church at 577 Orange St. and described his goal as building stronger families from within.

Three decades later, the church’s mission remains centered on strengthening families and serving the community.

The sanctuary beside the house remains modest. Andrews said it contains little beyond the worship space itself, with bathrooms and many of the functions necessary to operate the church located elsewhere on the property.

At its height, Andrews said Raines had roughly 200 members. Attendance now averages about 60 after changes that followed the pandemic, although the congregation also reaches an undetermined number of viewers through Facebook. The couple’s influence, however, is difficult to measure by Sunday attendance alone.

“I know that we will have limited growth until we get a bigger building,” Andrews said. “It’s a catch-22.”

At one point during the tour, Andrews opened a door. Boxes filled the room. Then another room. And another.

The collection is intentionally shrinking as the church prepares for construction, but for years the old house has served as a local landing point for donations that often leave almost as quickly as they arrive.

Raines partners with World Vision, receiving furniture, clothing, household products and other goods for redistribution to families. Church leaders said that when families lose homes to fires or other emergencies, the ministry has at times been able to help furnish entire households.

“We give out furniture, household products, clothing and other things,” Sharon Andrews said.

Raymond Andrews put the rule even more simply.

“Whatever we’ve got, they can have it,” he said.

That philosophy has led to unusual quantities of unusual things. Andrews recalled receiving nine large containers of light bulbs. Boxes of gloves have been distributed to emergency workers, restaurants, a funeral home and others who could use them. Children’s toys are held for community events. Other rooms have contained clothing, sanitary products and supplies awaiting someone who needs them.

Sometimes the scale has overwhelmed the house. A large community giveaway several months ago finally exposed the floor of one room that previously had been packed with donated furniture and supplies. Firefighters and other community partners helped move goods outside for distribution.

That collaboration is characteristic of the ministry, and perhaps nowhere is the network more visible than in the church’s food program.

Raines originally financed food distributions through its own congregation before partnering with Feeding the Valley in 2022. A 2024 Albany Herald report found the church was serving roughly 250 to 450 households at individual distributions, with cars sometimes lining the surrounding streets hours before food distribution began. Feeding the Valley had provided more than 71,000 meals to Terrell County families through the partnership by that time.

The church sits across from public housing, placing the need directly in front of the congregation. The need keeps growing, but the partners continue showing up.

The congregation’s list of collaborators stretches beyond food relief. The Andrewses described working with firefighters, police, the NAACP, other churches, World Vision and community organizations. Raines has hosted candidate forums designed to give office-seekers equal time to explain their platforms without turning the event into a debate. It has participated in downtown Easter sunrise services, children’s Easter activities, Halloween events and Christmas programs.

But decades of expanding ministry have also exposed the limitations of the property.

“Our primary goal right now is to build a sanctuary that matches what we do,” Andrews said.

He said he hopes to show visible progress before the end of the year, both to the community and his own congregation. That means the old house cannot remain indefinitely. There is, intentionally, no firm asking price.

Andrews’ priority is finding someone serious about preserving the building and capable of arranging its removal.

Its location could help. The property sits near a highway and toward the end of the street, making access potentially easier than moving a similar structure through a dense neighborhood. Anyone interested would still need a professional structural mover to determine whether the building could be moved intact or divided into sections.

The church has already deferred maintenance while preparing for the transition. Andrews said he largely stopped repairing the house about two years ago because continuing to pour money into a building that had to leave the site no longer made financial sense.

“We are so entrenched because we’ve been doing this for 30 years out of that house,” Andrews said. “That house was everything to us. So to just say ‘for sale’ or to give it away or to tear it down, it’s heartbreaking. But we gotta move forward because we don’t have the money. I have literally stopped repairing anything in that house for the last two years.”

That decision is visible, but church officials say they hope the deterioration is not irreversible for the right person or organization. Raines Baptist is hoping to hear from anyone with the means, expertise or interest to purchase, relocate or otherwise help preserve the house before demolition becomes necessary.

Those interested may contact Pastor Raymond Andrews or Sharon Andrews at Raines Baptist Church, 577 Orange St. NE, Dawson, GA 39842, or by email at [email protected].

For a congregation that has spent decades giving away what came through its doors, the final hope is to give away the doors themselves — and everything behind them — so the house on Orange Street can receive a little of what it has given to so many for more than a century: a second chance.