Little Country Church
Unity Baptist Church. photo by Frank Hohenberger
~ by Jeff Tryon
When I was growing up in Brown County, my family attended a little country church by the side of the road surrounded by farm fields, pasture, and woods.
It was a little white wooden church, built in 1845, with a barn-style gambrel roof and a steeple with a bell that rang every Sunday morning. It had stained glass windows with little brass plates honoring the donors.
The floors were wooden and creaky, polished like the pews by years of worship and careful cleaning. The entire sanctuary was burnished by the prayers of the saints; by many decades of worship; singing, preaching and prayer; shared triumphs and tragedies— a community repository of memories and traditions.
When it was founded in the late 19 th century, people arrived by horse and buggy or on foot, and baptisms regularly took place down at the local creek bank. It had twin pot-bellied stoves for heat in winter and little hand-held cardboard fans to cool in summer.
It was nurtured and grew through all the vagaries and triumphs of the 20 th century— when our parents endured the difficulty of“ hard times” and foreign wars, and enjoyed the post-war boom of prosperity.
In my time, they dealt with the difficulties of yet another foreign war, of the growing gulf between generations and rapid changes in social outlook.
These churches now struggle into a 21 st century fraught with abrupt change and irrevocable and unexpected developments. Stolid institutions like a little country church find change difficult to navigate.
These little country churches used to be the centers of community activity, where people played as children, met and married their sweethearts, worshipped side by side, week in
18 Our Brown County Jan./ Feb. 2017