Young's Chapel Methodist Church,

Ben Hill County, Georgia, 2001.

c. Brian Brown

Interior, Young's Chapel Methodist Church,

Ben Hill County, Georgia, 2001.

c. Brian Brown

Here is an annotation of an essay I published in the 2002 edition of Abraham Baldwin Agricultural College's literary magazine, Pegasus. The essay focuses on Young's Chapel, which, I'm sad to say, is in more critical condition than ever. It is a relic of another time, and it saddens me that the county, or even the community where it stands, hasn't done more to preserve it.

"Just over a slight ridge...sits Young's Chapel Methodist Church, in the last stages of a cancerous neglect. To illustrate it in terms the television generation might [best] understand, it's like something right out of Little House on the Prairie, quite similar...to the little congregational church in the Hollywood version of Walnut Grove. Once I discovered it was open, unlocked like some refuge from another century, I made it a shrine of my own imagining, and have taken many people to see it over the last few years. Unfortunately, the toll of time is about to endanger this option and render these visits impossible. As I write this, a light wind is probably whipping around that hill, and strips of tin roof are finding their way to the hard red earth below. Most of the old windows are falling out, not from vandalism, but from age. The wooden frames are simply bowing to the march of time.

The adjoining cemetery is well-maintained, if somewhat puzzling with its sharply mowed lane of graves marked unknown...I wondered how this could happen in such a place, where surely everyone within miles knew each other as neighbors. The unknown dead, though, will remain when the wasps and dirt daubers have long gone to the dust of the ruins. I like to think that twenty, thirty years from now, someone doing genealogical research...will make a pilgrimage here. The church will be long gone, but unless the earth is disemboweled by catastrophe, the bodies will [remain]."