During the 2021 homecoming celebration at Mount Tabor United Methodist Church, seniormost congregants Howard Touchstone and Donald White sat side by side in a pew halfway toward the pulpit, holding between them nearly 190 years of memories.
Their recollections take listeners back nine decades or more to sun-soaked afternoons when neighbors traveled dirt roads to the community blacksmith shop and cotton gin. Mount Tabor often served as a community hub in those days, and today, although the road is blacktop and power poles line the landscape, the church is still at the center of things as it prepares to observe its 175th anniversary — a demisemiseptcentennial for those in the know.
The congregation of Floyd County’s northernmost church has a monthlong celebration planned in April, and in typical country church fashion, quite literally everyone is invited.
‘An inspiration at the start’
At 97, Touchstone still welcomes the occasional guest to his home in Rome. Sitting at his kitchen table, he’ll run through a thoughtful reminiscence of his childhood in Everett Springs in another portion of Floyd County — a wilder one where a two-lane road winds up into the remote Pocket area.
His mother, Pearl Barton Touchstone, raised her four children on regular Mount Tabor services. Touchstone’s father attended sometimes with them. They lived a half mile from Everett Springs’ namesake public watering place, and the valley was filled with Whites, Ransoms, Touchstones and Bartons, the Bartons being a particularly prolific group.
“Back in those days, they had 10 people in their family,” Touchstone recalled. “And they had a Model A Ford, and they lived about four miles from the church, so (family patriarch) Ted Barton would bring a load down — five was about all you could get in those old Model As. Then, he’d go back and get the others, but they were all faithful.”
Touchstone was the only member of his family who left Everett Springs. He moved to Rome and continued his Methodist worship at West Rome Methodist Church where he taught Sunday school for nearly 60 years until the pandemic. He goes back to Mount Tabor every chance he gets.
“It’s still a great part of my life,” he said. “It was an inspiration at the start, and it’s still an inspiration”
On the circuit
White, 95, like Touchstone, lives in his own home, but he’s closer to the church. He, too, left the community as an adult. He spent 30 years working in Atlanta, but he returned in the early 1980s to reclaim the family farm, which had fallen back to overgrowth.
He was 14 when he got saved at Mount Tabor. Like Touchstone’s memories, White’s call forth a time when Everett Springs was bustling and the church was full.
Those were the days when Mount Tabor’s exterior was white clapboard and the pulpit sat in an alcove with windows all the way around (today, the area behind the pulpit is a solid wall). The church relied on a circuit preacher back then — rural places of worship didn’t always have a pastor in residence, so circuit riders visited churches across the area on a revolving basis. White recalls four churches on the circuit north of Rome, and congregations shifted and visited each location according to which one had a preacher on a given week.
White remembers gathering on Sundays under a huge red oak on the grounds.
“We’d sit out there and visit and get all the news. They didn’t have telephones back in those days” he said. “Come Sunday, you’d find out what had happened in the community. Back in those days, all that area down between the church and the road had trees growing in it. They had tables built down there where they’d have an all-day singing and all-day meetings — they’d have lunch down there.”
Someone once brought a whole case of frozen popsicles to one of these events.
“I ate so many of those things I was sick,” White said. “I couldn’t have been more than nine or 10 years old.”
Keeping traditions
Ray Barton, 67, is one of a handful of members whose tenure in the rollbooks is second in length only to White’s. Barton joined at the age of 10 during a revival.
“That’s when most people would join the church,” he recalled. “We’d always have a week revival in the summertime … That was before the church was air conditioned, so I remember being hot. Lots of fans going.”
Barton keeps the church’s official membership book now. Curling script on yellowed pages lists members beginning in 1886 giving way to more modern block lettering at some point and running up to the present day. Barton can trace the church’s physical expansion through the decades, too. He remembers when the current brick facade went up over the clapboard in the early 1960s.
“There was also a pot-bellied stove, and that was how the church was heated, and one Sunday — I think it was Easter — I think everybody was in their finest — and the flue came down and just (deposited) ash all over the congregation,” he recalled.
It was one reason the church moved to modernize the building. A wing behind the sanctuary went in to house Sunday School rooms, and years later, beyond that, there was an open-air pull-through with summer bathrooms. The church later enclosed that area and added a kitchen, which was followed by a larger kitchen when the fellowship hall went up. Later on, the facility’s gym-sized family life center — a large project for a country church — went in, helped by a significant gift from Barton and his late mother, Corinne Barton.
“It’s been quite a ride for a small country church. I’m quite proud of our little church, to be honest, for the facility that we have,” Ray said.
He’s done a lot of youth work over the years.
“I’ve probably been youth director longer than anybody down there,” he said. “The children are the future of the church. If you don’t do something to keep the children in the church, they’re going to find a place to go to that does have activities. So, that’s why I was, for all those years, involved with the youth ministry.”
Ray, who had a career in fundraising at Berry College, grew up on and still inhabits his family’s 375-acre farm near the Pocket. He’s felt no pull to attend another church.
“Never considered going anywhere else. Don’t want to go anywhere else,” he said. “Like I showed on the register, it’s my dad, my granddad, my great-granddad. It’s just the family history … It’s home.”
He’s looking forward now to April when the community will gather to celebrate the church’s demisemiseptcentennial milestone.
“We had a 150th (anniversary) when I was younger, but I don’t remember us doing anything super special,” he said. “It’s an exciting time. I’m glad to be a part of it when I’m young enough to be involved but old enough to add some nostalgia to it.”
More Information Mount Tabor United Methodist Church will celebrate its 175th anniversary this April with a string of events and special services to which the entire community is invited. Here’s the schedule: April 2 — 10:30 a.m.: Palm Sunday service. Music: Jennifer Maloney Wiegand. Service: Steve Lyle April 9 — 7:30 a.m.: Sunrise service April 9 — 11 a.m.: Music: Mount Tabor UMC Choir. Service: Dr. Dale McConkey April 16 — 10:30 a.m.: Music: Mount Tabor UMC Choir. Service: Dr. Wayne Hopper. April 23 — 10:30 a.m.: Music: Jamie Barton (space will be limited for this performance). Service: Bryan Smith April 30 — 10:30 a.m.: Music: Berry College worship band. Service: Dr. Dale McConkey April 30 — 6 p.m.: Fifth Sunday night singing with potluck dinner to follow