7 Chapter 7
Final Years
After nearly twenty years on the Pacific coast, the Troy’s made their final journey to Washington D.C. where Troy would lead his largest congregation to date. The Ephesus Church, renamed the Dupont Park Seventh-day Adventist Church when his pastorship began in 1958, boasted a six-hundred membered congregation and a newly constructed $650,000 building education complex in Dupont Park section of Washington, DC. One of Troy’s main duties was to oversee the completion of this project, which was finished in 1959.[1]
As Mervyn Warren observed, Troy “was in a category of Black Adventist ministers who considered themselves to be the spokespersons for educational advancement in religion.” And, as associate secretary for the Sabbath School Department of the General Conference, the denomination’s headquarters, Troy was in a pivotal position.[2]
After a brief battle with spinal cancer, Troy passed away at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda in Maryland on January 18, 1962.[3]
Following her husband’s death, Ruby Bontemps Troy remained in the Washington, D.C., area serving at the Dupont Park church school until 1966, when she accepted the post of director of admissions at Oakwood College under Dr. Frank Hale’s presidency, followed by serving as Church Clerk under E. C. Ward’s pastorate of the Oakwood College Church. After earning an M.A. in Counseling and Guidance at Alabama A&M University, she taught sociology, psychology, and marriage and family at Oakwood. She remained in Huntsville until her death in 1987. Owen A. Troy, Jr. (1927–2013), who oversaw public relations and management of the Book and Bible House for the Northeastern Conference at the time of his father’s death, continued a distinguished career in denominational work that included an overseas mission stint in Sierra Leone and several years in the Communication Department of the General Conference.[4]