Fordyce United Methodist Church on the Whiteley Township side of town cuts a low profile when seen from Garards Fort Road. There is no high spire to announce its spiritual presence, and at first glance the tidy buff brick building could be mistaken for a school. But to the neighbors who congregate here, it is a fine family sanctuary that teaches love thy neighbor as yourself and don’t forget the ties that bind.
Kathy Morris Miller tells me that her three-times-great grandfather Johathan Morris and his good neighbor John Moredock gave land from their farms in 1837 to build a meeting place “for the benefit of the neighborhood.” The deed stipulated that church services held there would be “equally free for all regularly organized denomination of Christians” as long as they didn’t interfere with regular school hours. Preachers were allowed “one Sabbath in two weeks if another denomination wished to use the building.” The settlement sat at a crossroads and the first store had yet to be built. But the farmers who had pioneered this land now had a place where communion and education brought them together.
That first meetinghouse is no more, although it remains identified as a schoolhouse on the Greene Township side of the crossroads in the 1876 Caldwell’s Centennial Atlas of Greene County.
John Moredock later deeded another parcel across the road in Whiteley Township in 1856 and parishioners built a wood frame Methodist Protestant church there. It was beside a log cabin that became the parsonage and, later, the home of James and Fern Cline.
Pleasant Valley Methodist Protestant Church remained on the Monongahela Circuit as an uncharted church into the 20th century before it was incorporated as United Methodist in 1914.
Church records give a wry account of how change happens in a thrifty farming community. When the congregation “tentatively” decided to build a new brick church in the summer of 1923, presiding pastor Reverend J.P. Adams helped them make up their minds. “On Monday morning before daylight Rev. Adams started demolishing the old church. The indecision by some of the trustees was changed in favor of building a new church when daylight arrived.”
When I ask Kathy how he did it, she grins. “He used a crow bar.”
When finished, the new church was lauded in the press as a modern structure of artistic design with an arch above the altar, beautiful woodwork and a modern kitchen in the basement. The $18,000 price tag caused some consternation about money that was still owed, but help was on its way. Kathy’s sleuthing located a newspaper article that tells us Dr. John Calvin Broomfield of the Pittsburgh Conference came for the dedication on October 12, 1923 and made a passionate appeal for funds to “clear the church of debt.” Three services were held that day, free lunch was served to all and $7300 was raised – more than enough to burn the mortgage then and there.
Reverend Adams wasn’t the only “shoot from the shoulder” pastor to preach that old time religion in Fordyce. Sometime in the late 1940s, journalist William Faust wrote about Reverend Larry HB “Hell Bent” Jewel, a reformed “hoodlum” turned old time country preacher. The Lord may have turned his life around but seems to have left his personality cheerfully intact. While driving his weekly Sunday charge between churches, Faust reported “he looks for groundhogs, which he calls whistle pigs, to take pot shots at” with his Winchester 52. As a Nemacolin Mine mechanic “in addition to respecting him as a man of the cloth, his fellow workers respect his 220 pound bulk.” At church his hobbies of building model trains and planes where used “to entertain the boys in his Sunday schools.” At home in Khedive, he farmed three acres, milked his goats and lived with his family in a restored 150-year-old log cabin. Daughter Erna Jane Ross saved the stories he told about the wild days of his youth in her book Hell Bent…Plucked as a Brand from the Burning and read some of them aloud at church in 2017, standing where her father once stood behind the pulpit.
The crown jewel of this country church is arguably the 4’ x 6’ oil reproduction of Christ at Gethsemane by Hoffman that hangs behind the pulpit. Greene County artist Emmon Haines (1883-1958) toured the world by freighter after retiring as a civil engineer in 1948. A 19-day visit to the Holy Land during Passover set him on a six year pilgrimage painting and donating classic biblical scenes to churches and remote missionary stations, from the Arctic Circle to a leper colony in the Philippines. Once home, he taught Sunday school, gave art lessons and painted biblical master works to give to local churches. His family farm is just over the hill near Muddy Creek in Jefferson Township.
Modern touches like handicap ramps, new windows and carpeting were added in 2008 and today’s congregation of a dozen families can be found helping out at the White Covered Bridge during the September festival, filling Samaritans Purses and hopefully getting back to monthly dinners when the COVID-19 restrictions are lifted.
Kathy, a retired music teacher, plays piano on Sunday and tells me Pastor Phil Yost has a powerful message to share. At the height of the lockdown it was delivered through speakers and parishioners in the parking lot held up signs and honked their horns amen. Now the pews are taped off properly and members are back inside for Sunday services that start at 11 a.m.