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."