Beech Spring Cemetery, Hopedale, Ohio

Harrison County, Ohio, is a lovely place.  Call me a dork, but I fan-girled over a cemetery out there just yesterday.  It was very hard to find this place, but I read about it recently in a book of religious history in the Ohio River Valley.  

There was once a church here called Beech Spring Presbyterian Church, and a very familiar old hymn tune is named after it--though sometimes misspelled "Beach" Spring.  It's a pleasant, old-fashioned, folk tune, but not twangy or trite.  It's distinctly American, but with a rural dignity to it.

When I learned that the sacred place that the tune was named for was well within my reach, I had to go there.  I knew the church had been torn down in 1926.  And it was no surprise that the beech grove and the water spring were gone, too.  But I was astonished and thrilled to find out that the churchyard is still there.  A flagpole, historical marker, and the old cornerstone mark the level area where the building once stood.  The date on the cornerstone is 1830.

In order to get here, you truly have to drive down narrow mud lanes through cow pastures and brushy countryside where people dump their old mattresses.  Isn't it strange to think that this was once an influential place in the development of American religion, and culture, and the state of Ohio.  How a place's fortunes can change with the years!  Now it is only memorialized in the name of a tune that only a dork like I would know.

You know what I did, don't you?  I took my pan flute to the old holy site and there I played the tune that came out of this place, low these 218 years ago.  I thought the ghosts would like it, that it would rejoice their old bones to hear their song played once again out over the green and silent hills.  The silence here is lovely, but so was the music.  Do a YouTube search for "Beech Spring Hymn Tune," except that some fool probably labeled it "Beach Spring."  

Sara Parks Hickman Rowley

This “annex” is for mementos of journeys outside Pennsylvania.  Although photos on the annex don't usually come with words, I wanted to say a few things here, to make mention of an unsung life.  I own a festering old redbrick farmhouse that has been largely engulfed by the bland suburbs of Pittsburgh.  All that remains of a 220 acre farm is 3/4 of an acre with a lovely (if cantankerous) old house, a summer kitchen, and some old rusting farm implements.  We've got bats in the attic, field stone foundations, ancient glass in the windows that distorts the sunlight with its ripples, and troubles galore: plumbing, sewage, leaks, unexpected expenses.  It's endless, a true money pit, and I daily complain about the place.  But I love it.  It's the one home my children have known.  It’s the first house I ever owned.  Its story matters to me.  I wonder about the people who once lived there. 

It was also once home to the prosperous Hickman Clan, who raised six children of their own in it.  I know very little about them except their dates of birth and death, their spouses’ names, and the fact that they were members of the Presbyterian church in Bridgeville, PA.  The eldest child was Sara Parks Hickman, who married her second cousin, a man who bore her mother's maiden name, Rowley.  She's now buried in this churchyard in Ohio.  Bethel Presbyterian Church sits in as lonely a spot as any building I know—surely lovely in October and June, but melancholy under April gray.  It puts me in mind of Thomas Grey's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard."  But this is where the first Hickman child is buried.  She died at the age of 83 in 1957.  She was probably born in one of the bedrooms where my family and I sleep at Hickman House.

Her son and daughter-in-law are buried in the same rural cemetery.  Interesting that someone is still placing plastic flowers on Sara's grave, but the grave of Sara's son is bare.  Could it be her grandchild?  I find no information online about grandchildren.  Also, the scant information I find spells her name "Sara," but the headstone calls her "Sarah."

Just parenthetically, here lies a faithful colleague who served this quiet parish for thirty years, and whose own baby daughter is buried in this churchyard...

In about the year 1900, Sara married a man named Rowley--her second cousin--and he took her off to the Ohio Country to be a farm wife.  There she joined the little Presbyterian church pictured here and bore two children, a boy and a girl.  The boy, Joseph--named perhaps for his grandpa (her dad) who who died in my house near Pittsburgh in 1910--lived to a decent old age.  The daughter died married but childless in her 50s.  Sara Rowley is the only child born in my house whose obituary can be found online.  It says that she lived on a farm four miles south of Lisbon, Ohio, on state route 164.  Sara died after a month in the hospital, where she was taken for a broken hip.  She was a member of this church and the local grange.  And that's all.  A whole human life.  I do not know what she was like, if she had a good marriage, if she was happy, if she was kind, or what her secret thoughts were.  I do not know if she had good friends who saw her through this life or if she was lonely.  I do not know if she wept when she left her parents' farm to move out west to Ohio--a distance of about 55 miles, which might as well have been 550 back then.  But I do know that she took her first steps in one of the rooms where my family and I live.  She learned to speak there.  I can surmise that she was a daddy’s girl, for she named her son after her father.  She and I happen to belong to the same old-fashioned sect of Christendom, to boot.  And we share some knowledge of the same antique quirks of a certain old house near Pittsburgh.  The only other facts I hold are that she was a teacher before she got married and a widow when she died.  That’s all.  I just wanted Sara to have her own little piece of real estate on the Internet--no matter how inaccessible.