Shining the Light

by Colleen Nelson

The South Ten Mile Baptist Church still cuts a handsome profile against the hill that leads up from State Route 21 as it heads into Graysville. No one attends services there any more – unless you count the family of raccoons that probably returned to live in the attic after the local Christian teen group, lead by moms Patti Wilson and Maggie Hallam, stopped using it as a community center at the turn of the last century. I visited there with Sam Harvey in 2011, when he was a spry 96 and full of family lore. I picked him up in Carmichaels and brought him home to this neck of the woods to reminisce. This is where his three times great grandfather Samuel walked from Philadelphia after the Revolutionary War and spent his service pension on a 400 acre tract of land stretching along the road below and up the hill on either side of Hopewell Road.

“He was born in England in 1751,” Sam told me, running his hand across the top of Samuel’s tombstone. “He decided to locate here and bring his boys away from the city life they were living back east.”

Samuel died suddenly in 1807, six months after establishing the Harvey homestead, and his sons were left to mind the estate. In time William and Thomas built a two-story log house in what would become the town of Graysville and opened as a hotel to catch travelers going to and from Wheeling and the Ohio River. Brother Joseph, an organ builder, cut holes in the floor for the pipe organ. Family history notes drily: “there was nothing but dissipation and frolic practiced here for many years.”

Thomas next appears in church records as assistant Sunday school teacher when the first meetinghouse was built in 1842 and Reverend John Miller came to preach. Brother William was a Princeton educated Presbyterian, but Thomas, it seems, was taken by the Baptist spirit Daniel Throckmorton brought to the neighborhood when he moved from Carmichaels and “convinced his neighbors to organize a church.” In 1833, 16 converts held their first service in the home of John Goodwin and until the meeting house was built, gathered in family homes as their numbers grew.

In 1849 the new church got the charismatic Reverend Tilton and purchased its first church bible and hymnbook. Services were by candlelight and there was little heat but families continued to sing and pray together through all kinds of weather.

By 1850 another Sam Harvey, this one a greatgreat, was made a church deacon. His son William Cook fought in the Civil War and died in 1863 “when he was just 16. They buried him at Arlington but his father went and got him and brought him home to be beside him,” Sam told me, gesturing towards the circle of Harvey stones around him.

William and Thomas were buried on the farm but their sister Maria Harvey “would have none of that. She bought this plot and moved them. That’s her stone over there. She was the first pharmacist in Greene County and she had a dress shop too. She was a strong minded woman and she never married.”

The church we see today was built in 1883 when the congregation finally outgrew its meetinghouse and gas and oil money was beginning to fill the pockets of parishioners. It’s a sturdy frame structure still, most likely crafted by those handy farmers who worshiped here.

In 1933 there were 65 active members ready to celebrate a century of covenant with neighbors helping neighbors in the spirit of the Lord. The Great Depression was not making life easy but these hearty farm families were happy to gather on August 2 of that year and have a basket dinner with friends and neighbors, then a history reading afternoon, a supper break at 5 p.m. and services at 8. The Centennial church bulletin on file at Cornerstone Genealogical Society in Waynesburg tells us this in between the ads of the area businesses and the E.J. Sanders store is on page one.

Sam told me he had to quit school at age 15 to become the man of the house when his dad died in 1931 and “we didn’t have two nickels to rub together.” He worked the farm and sometimes pulled a paycheck working on oil derricks and the gas lines being laid across the hills and valleys. By the 1950s he had pulled up stakes and was working for Texas Eastern as the big transmission lines were being laid across Pennsylvania to New York. His family would be raised in Carlisle and Sam would not return home until after retirement in 1980. By 1986 he had bought the “old Harvey place” and was back to raising Suffolk sheep.

Sam was not the only kid who left the farm in the 1950s to look for a better job. This generational drain took a toll on little country churches everywhere. Finally, there was no one left to attend church but the “old folks” Bill Pettit tells me when I stop by to interview him about the goings on in Rutan.

The church closed in 1996 and some of its few remaining members went to Beulah Baptist Church, near Nineveh.

Luckily, once back in his old stomping grounds, Sam helped keep community spirit alive through changing times. Harveys Grange is so named because the town of Graysville was once known as Harveys and the grange had its first hall there. Later, a new hall was built on Rt. 21 going towards Rutan and when Sam returned, he became a member. When Community Action came looking for a site for the West Greene Senior Center, he worked hard with his “brothers and sisters” to get it up and running at the grange hall.

Sam finally retired from farming in 2006, turned the farm over to his sons and was “glad to be alive every day” until 2014.

Sam Harvey would be happy to know seniors still gather every Thursday at Harvey’s Grange from 8 a.m. until 2 p.m. and the food and socializing are what draws them together to visit like old times. Cinch is still a popular card game to play before and after lunch and health pros stop by on a regular basis to do free blood pressure screenings.

Which might be a good thing if you just lost a round of cinch because of your partner!