Wine merchant William Milne had a fine stone house built at Cannon and Wentworth when Canada was just a few years old.

If he were to rise from the grave and go past that corner today, he would be saddened to see that his home - erected so solidly with beefy blocks of the best limestone - is gone.

But he would be mistaken. His house is still there, nearly every inch of it. It's just that the Lord made it disappear from view.

Milne's mysterious house-that-vanished is now for sale at $1.6 million. There is no other property in Hamilton like it. (Bill King knows that, and thanks go to him for the tip on this one. He's now working on his latest book, "Hamilton's Stone Age.")

We go back 140 years. Hamilton is small, but does have some churches, including one of the Baptist persuasion. And the congregation believed it was time for a Sunday-school outpost in the barren wilds of the east end "for the neglected children who spend their Sundays in rough games and noisy play, many receiving no moral or religious training."

A small unpainted one-storey shack is erected near Wentworth and King William in the fall of 1879.

About 20 years later, Wentworth Baptist rises there, a church that seats 500. And the place had been full hours before a blaze in the fall of 1922 that caused heavy damage. Only the basement remained, and for a time the congregation met there. They vowed to rebuild.

By then, William Milne - the man in that stone house a couple of blocks north - had been dead for decades. Wife Annie stayed on, and died the year of the church fire.

Wentworth Baptist Church, on the corner of Cannon and Wentworth. | John Rennison, The Hamilton Spectator

The house, with spacious grounds, soon went on the market and the people of Wentworth Baptist decided it would be just right. They chose not to clear the land. The stone house would stay. They attached a fine church to the west end of it.

It was not long before they needed more space, and built a large addition on the east end of the Milne home for a Sunday school and upstairs apartment for the minister. (Refugees live in those second-floor rooms today.)

And 26 years ago, one more addition: a lobby right across the front. With that, the stone house disappeared from view.

The challenges churches face today are well known. Wentworth Baptist is no different.

The foyer to Wentworth Baptist Church opening into a room in the original house stone house around which the church was built. The stone of the home can be seen on this side of the archway. | John Rennison, The Hamilton Spectator

The pastor there for the past five years is Sean McGuire. He is 31, six-foot-six, and loves the novel history of this place. He leads a tour with enthusiasm.

"We call this the parlour," he says.

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The Milnes might have called it that too, a century and a half ago. The church uses it today as a counselling and prayer room. The ceiling is high and ornate. It is elegant here.

There are other spaces like this - a nursery, a youth room - downstairs and up. Then we climb to the roof, admire the rugged stone chimneys. The city is all around us. When this house was built, we would have looked east and seen nothing but farmland.

In the early 1920s, the congregation of Wentworth Baptist bought a fine stone house at Wentworth and Cannon and began building a church all around it. | Church archives

The main auditorium of the church is intact, right down to the pastoral painting over the original walk-in baptismal tank. That tank is still used today. From the balcony, there is a fine view of the ceremonial soakings.

But there are fewer such events, because the congregation is not what it was. Maybe 40 families. Not nearly enough to keep this 15,000-square-foot conglomeration in good repair.

"These decisions are hard to make," McGuire says. "We're experiencing the emotional loss of the building, but preparing for what God has for us next."

Whatever that is, it will be smaller.

In the meantime, they still worship Sunday mornings at 10 at the house that became holy.

The parlour from the original house. | John Rennison, The Hamilton Spectator

Paul Wilson's column appears Tuesdays.

PaulWilson.Hamilton@gmail.com