Old Bethesda : at the Head of Rockfish
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mm H o*^v> 1 I HHHI HH HBHHHH HI HHHKal HB HHHHIh Hmhmb HNhHHBnlflBi HHHfflHHShh HHRKhi Hal mm HH DUKE UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Gilt oi Estate of Elizabeth G Cooke OLD BETHESDA At the Head of Rockfish Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2014 https://archive.org/details/oldbethesdaatheaOObutl_0 Photo by Jo tin nernmer Old Bethesda Church. Side View Showing Entrance to Slave Gallery. OLD BETHESDA zAt the J£ead of%ockfish By BION H. BUTLER GROSSET & DUNLAP PUBLISHERS NEW YORK Copyright, 1933, BY BION H. BUTLER Southern Pines North Carolina All Rights Reserved Printed and Bound in the United States of America by KINGSPORT PRESS, INC., KINGSFORT, TENNESSEE DEDICATION When Clyde Davis left the Sandhills for New York to join the staff of the World's Work, a parting note said he had hoped to live and die in the vicinity of Mount Helicon, where after death he, with James McNeill Johnson and Bion H. Butler, could on moonlight nights foregather on the tops of their tombstones and enjoy each oth- er's society as in life. Davis went away and died. Johnson lies in Bethesda, and in the expectation that I may some day join him there and that we may thus keep our vigils, I inscribe his name here, where other names are not written because to cover the list I would like to remember would take a page. Many godly and wholesome friends lie beneath the trees over there, where the journey has ended, examples for those who follow, but I knew my fine old friend Johnson more intimately than I knew most of the rest. The Author. Ar nathair ata ar neamh, naomhthar hainm; Tigeadh do rioghachd, deuntar do thoil ar an Hhalamb. CONTENTS Introduction, by James Boyd xi Prologue xix Bethesda xxv The Head of Rockfish 1 Sinai to Jerusalem 22 Galilee to Calvary 35 Gethsemane to Culloden 44 Developing the Promise 65 Troubling the Waters 101 Hoisting the Banner 118 Swarming Time 160 In the Wilderness 169 Canaan 184 Sherman Arrives 203 A David with a Pebble 239 Diversion 256 Saint Andrews 265 Clouds 271 Coronach 279 Eliashib and His Brethren 281 Miserere Mei Domine 286 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS FACING PAGE Old Bethesda Church Frontispiece Subscription List of 1850 20 Jonathan E. Buchan, Ruling Elder 74 Peter Cornelius Shaw, long Ruling Elder ... 90 John B. Graham, Ruling Elder 44 Years . 122 Rev. Ernest Lowry Barber, Present Pastor . 130 John Blue, Ruling Elder 138 Old Bethesda Cemetery 148 James McNeill Johnson, Elder and Treasurer . 170 Slave Gallery 188 Aunt Winnie and Author 202 Tomb of Walter Hines Page 242 INTRODUCTION When I was a boy, my grandmother used to take me sometimes down to Old Bethesda. The church stood, sombre and abandoned, in an oak grove at the foot of a small farmed valley below a looming hill. Only now and then the congre- gation, who had long before moved into Aber- deen, came back to hold services there. On such a Sunday my grandmother would forsake her own church in Southern Pines and drive down to Bethesda. The wheels of the station wagon sifted the deep sand. The dogwoods and gum trees along the creek went slowly by. Sitting in my hot woolen Sunday suit, I used to try to see beyond the fat back of Levi, our colored coachman, and the two sorrels, to catch glimpses of cottontails and bobwhites crossing the lonely road. A ruined fence and a tangle of honeysuckle and wild grape stopped among pines at the edge of a small but solemn grove of oaks. There stood the church, a great square box on sparse rock piers. xi xii INTRODUCTION It was not much more than the simplest possible way of providing a house of worship for a large number of people. But there is a good deal to be said for the simplest way of doing anything. It still seems to me a sounder building than most of the more elegant churches that now dot our more progressive countryside. I turn from their bilious glass and imitation stone to Bethesda's thin, tall windows and restful sides, silvered with weather and almost forgotten paint. Its large simplicity among the oaks gave it a certain meagre and unassuming dignity. Across the road, among traditional funereal cedars, Scots' names lay scattered on the over- grown graves. Among the briars and the sprout- ing pines were crude lumps of ferrous rock and later slabs inscribed in fine thin letters that, like the church, echoed the precise and simple dignity of a certain epoch. There was also a small com- munity of terra cotta headstones of Huguenots, exiles among the exiles of the graveyard. Here and there a later arrival strove to triumph over mortality by dint of heavy lettering and polished granite and by some attempt at neatness about the mound. But for the most part briars and broom grass, pine and sassafras were coming in again. The pioneers were yielding to the outposts of the forest against which they had fought. The graves are tended now ; a state road leads INTRODUCTION xiii to the site ; a flimsy metal arch spans the highway with its large tin letters. Thus our awakened consciousness of a heritage achieves some slight deferment of oblivion. But in those days I only thought that rabbits were getting thick in that old burying ground and that foxes sometimes came up from the branch to hunt them. Our wheels rustled through dead leaves and stopped on hard-packed sand before the church door. I struggled with the problem of extracting from the station wagon my grandmother's for- midable and magnificently decorated bulk. Levi drove off among the other carriages and buggies. From around the door there were greetings, showing, under the flawlessly courteous but de- tached good manners of our region, a trace of warmth. For my grandmother, though a Yankee, was, like themselves, a Presbyterian. And a Presby- terian of no mean potency. Reared by her father, the great divine, on iron kernels of the faith, she was apt, like themselves, at theological dialectics and could even, if necessity arose, con- found an adversary with awe inspiring reserves of Greek and Latin. And like themselves, she viewed without emotion, but very clearly, the amiable inconsequentialities of Episcopalian ritual and the unreasoned evangelical excesses of Meth- odists and Baptists. While as for Romanists, xiv INTRODUCTION they occupied a mere but distinctly dreadful limbo of her consciousness. When to this she added the absolute pitch in music and a quick eye for the comic, the congregation of Bethesda could not feel unfriendly toward her. Inside, the church drew tall solemnity from its plain, age-darkened wood. A simple pulpit reared up in front and, behind, the deep and shadowy slave gallery, long empty, brooded over us. The men sat on the right, the women on the left. There was harsh, true singing in methodi- cal time, with heavy slurred effects by the altos. Our section has always been a great country for altos. I know of no place where an alto is more properly esteemed. In consequence, they are not afraid to bear down strongly and make a hack- neyed tune into something better. When a stranger hears the people of our section sing, he feels that they are a little strange and wild, and that the women are strong. He feels the way the English used to feel about the Scots. After the singing, a point of dogma was ex- pounded with all the restrained passion of a mathematician demonstrating a proposition of Euclid to unbelievers. This was an affair of per- haps an hour—a brief moment, compared with the wheeling aeons of the Apocalypse, and brief even to the sinewy souls and bodies of the older members sitting in dark, immobile rows. But al- INTRODUCTION xv ready the new age showed itself in the softness of my fibre. I hung on, not by physical or moral power but by mere unhappy dint of will, while the pine pew gnawed at me like the fox in the Spartan's vitals. Afterwards, we stood under the trees and the preacher, showing another aspect of godhead, made kind inquiries and passed friendly jokes. Levi's instinct brought the station wagon at the perfect climax of my grandmother's repartee. Then we were on the sandy road again. Some years later, remembering those days, I read among the records of the church. On the yellow leaves the handwritings of long dead Clerks of the Session changed from time to time, but all were neat and firm and graceful. In the slow chronicle of collections and disbursements, of church elections and delegations to the Pres- bytery, of members baptised, received, or given the letters which would admit them to other con- gregations in the West, there stood out now and then a brief account that showed the old church as not only a religious body but a civic world. There were trials before the Session for fighting, profane swearing, drunkenness ; women were tried —God save us!—for slander, or as common scolds. And then, like a lightning flash from a calm, slow-moving cloud, a man or a woman would be before the Session on charges that show xvi INTRODUCTION that it was not alone in Hawthorne's Salem of the Scarlet Letter that passion tried to break the mould of strictly organized society. And what were the punishments for all these erring ones—the greater or the less? They were suspended from their membership. For their sins they were denied the privilege of listening long hours on the harsh pine boards to an exposition of Predestination and Free Will.