On 14 November 1822 a royal decree granted the people of Namsskogan permission to build a chapel of their own. Permission was not a building. The settlements strung along the upper Namsen were small and widely separated, the nearest church lay far down the valley, and the ten years that followed went into the unglamorous work such communities have always done: collecting money farm by farm, settling on a site, and waiting for a summer dry enough and a winter with enough hands free to raise timber. The chapel was consecrated in 1832. A full decade separates the signature from the first service, which is roughly how long these things took when a congregation had to fund itself out of forest, fish and hard weather.

What they built was a long church — the commonest Norwegian plan, a rectangular nave running into a narrower chancel on a single axis, everything pointing one direction. The material was timber, the finish white, and the seating capacity about 150. That number is worth pausing on. Trones is a hamlet at 140 metres above sea level where the Namsen runs past, roughly 30 kilometres south of the village of Namsskogan, and 150 seats is a great deal of bench for such a place. Rural Norwegian congregations built for the crowd that appeared at Christmas, at confirmations and at funerals, not for an ordinary Sunday. The church still carries protected status in the Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage's register.

Ole Scheistrøen was born in Skei, in what is now Surnadal Municipality, and he never much cared for the title of architect — he called himself a builder. Over a long career he drew and raised something close to fifty Norwegian churches and supervised construction on a dozen more designed by others. In 1884 he and his wife moved from Surnadal to Namsos, which put him in Namdalen and within reach of the parishes up the Namsen. In 1910 the Trones chapel was rebuilt and renovated to his plans, when he was 77 years old. He died in Namsos in 1921, aged 87. So the attribution is not quite invented; it is only off by seventy-eight years and one generation of the building's life. During the 1910 work the congregation simply moved into the local school and held services there until the church was ready again. It was worked on once more in 1980.

The chapel was eventually upgraded to full parish church status, and today it is the main church for the Namsskogan parish, part of the Namdal deanery in the Diocese of Nidaros. It has two much younger siblings in the same municipality: Skorovatn Chapel, from 1965, and Bjørhusdal Church, a brown wooden long church from 1970 that seats about 120. Trones Church outranks all of them in age by well over a century — and, more oddly, it outranks the place it belongs to. Namsskogan Municipality was not created until 1 July 1923, when it was separated from Grong, and the name Namsskogan itself was invented in that same year. The church had been standing for ninety-one years before anyone thought to call this stretch of woods by its present name.