Rabbit Box Blog

A cousin who shall be nameless keeps telling me I need to write up some family stories before the old ones kick off, me included. So, with apologies to my friends who won’t find these stories interesting, here’s my first installment. Mom has been made aware that she is the longest surviving member (two other women are older, but they have not been members as long) of Alexis Baptist Church, so she’s been trying to meet with a committee of members to talk about the church’s history. They haven’t managed to meet yet, so she tells me the stories she’s been waiting to tell them.

Alexis Baptist Church was founded by members of Mount Zion Baptist Church, including her aunt, Sallie Nantz, who lived in the old Nantz house in Alexis, and in fact helped build it. In my lifetime we called the house the Shelton house because by then it belonged to my grandfather, Nelson Shelton. Mom lived there as a girl. 

Aunt Sally and her family were originally members of Mount Zion Baptist Church, which was several miles away. My wife Joyce’s grandparents lived nearby, and they also wanted a closer church than Mount Zion.

The land for Alexis Baptist Church was donated by Coleman Abernathy. Services were originally held in a brush arbor, which Bob Nantz, Nelson Shelton’s grandfather and owner of the farm where the Nantz house was, helped build the arbor. Mom remembers her mother, Estie Shelton, told her the arbor was in the field where the graveyard is now.

With the establishment of Alexis Baptist, residents of the Nantz farm could walk just a few hundred yards through the woods to church. When she lived on the farm, Mom and her family walked on the path that their kinsmen had made. I remember paths on that part of the farm, but by my time they all stopped at the creek that followed the property line. I never knew about the shortcut to church.

Later the congregation built a wooden church building. Dad took a picture of it just before it was demolished. That picture has been used in all the histories we’re aware of. When the current brick building was completed in 1951 (the year I was born), the congregation apparently found no reuse value in the old church, so they tore it down. Joyce remembers her mother telling her it wasn’t much of a building. It lacked central heating and cooling, had no restrooms, and was too small for the growing congregation. Daphna Shelton, who grew up in the church, remembers it fondly and says it served the members well.

Mom remembers that in the early days, the men of the church sat on the left side of the room, and the women sat on the right. Families did not sit together. Mom remembers that when she and Dad got married,  she did not want to sit apart from him. Another newlywed pair agreed that the old ways were no longer appropriate, so the two couples sat together. The practice of separation ended shortly after that, so much so that Daphna, who is only a few years younger than Mom, has no memory of the separation of the sexes and is skeptical of this memory. But other people have written of a similar practice at Bruington Memorial Baptist (now First Baptist) in nearby Stanley.Nelson and Estie Shelton, Mom’s parents, were regulars at the church, she told me. I found this memory strange, because by the time I came along, they did not attend church at all. Estie told me when I was a boy that she couldn’t stand those “old hard benches,” but even as a child I suspected there must be a stronger reason. I never found out what that reason might be.

Nelson’s half-brother Ben Shelton led the singing, Mom said. There was no choir, just congregational singing. The piano was played by Ola Rhyne, nicknamed Lady Bang-Bang. Her style was apparently quite robust. Mom said “she didn’t play the piano, she banged on it.”

Some Sundays Ben did not lead the singing because he was too angry. When he told Ora the hymns he had selected, she would exercise veto power. “It’s my piano and I’ll play what I like,” she would say, “and I’m not playing that.”