When I was in college, I preached every Sunday at Good Hope Baptist Church in north Madison County.
Now, I refrain from saying I “pastored” the church. There is a lot more to “pastoring” than just showing up and delivering a message. However, I did manage to visit each church family at least once every six weeks or so. That’s because each family rotated feeding the preacher after church every Sunday.
One of the older couples at Good Hope was Brewer and Robbie Lee Browning. The Brownings bought their land way back when they married. Brewer told me the first thing he built was a barn. I asked him why he didn’t build the house first. He said because they were going to have to make a living off the land and to do that there had to be a barn. The barn was the central point of being there.
Today, Church Hill is once again emerging as a viable community after a long dormancy. As people started moving there and restoring homes, the idea of “community” began to evolve, as opposed to being just a bunch of neighbors.
Mr. Brewer’s priorities came to mind the other day when I was at Lake Washington south of Greenville. Lake Washington is one of the best crappie lakes in Mississippi. But my old friend Mike Jones who lives there told me when the Mississippi River flooded in 2011 and 2016 water backed all the way into the lake and brought with it some species of fish they’d rather not have. Asian carp for example. They’re trying to fish the lake back to the way it was before the floods.
At the lower end of Lake Washington is the ruin of St. John’s church. It was built shortly after the pioneer planters cleared the hardwoods and settled there. A tornado in the early 1900s left St. John’s about the way it looks today.
I’ve done stories there before. But for some reason Mr. Brewer and his barn came to mind when I saw it the other day, thinking about how central this church must have been in defining the early community at Lake Washington — like Mr. Brewer’s barn defined his homestead.
Many Mississippi towns grew up around railroads. The railroad gave them an identity. But before railroads, settlements became communities around churches. Church Hill in Jefferson County comes to mind. Just how central the church was to the community dawned on me the other day when I was at Church Hill doing a story about the restoration of the old Wagner’s Grocery. The store is right across the road from the church.
Today, Church Hill is once again emerging as a viable community after a long dormancy. As people started moving there and restoring homes, the idea of “community” began to evolve, as opposed to being just a bunch of neighbors. One of the first acts of “community” they did was to restore regular services at the church at Church Hill.
Like Mr. Brewer knew he couldn’t have a home without a barn to center it, a “place” can’t be a “community” without something to center it, like a church.
