Chapter 30- Part 5
This week, the year is 1908 and little Lena is not so little any more. Her mind wonders off on rabbit trails as she sits and ponders the stories she has heard again and again over the years. It seems that the stories about Aunt Lou were especially interesting to a young girl in her teenage years. As she reviews those stories in her thoughts, she wonders what Aunt Lou’s life might have been like if it had not been for her weak constitution.
At my age, then 15, Aunt Lou’s life seemed very romantic and I fancied the collaboration with the Methodists and Campbellites was a tribute to her esteem of the piety of lost loves of those faiths, for many were the stories of her romances I had heard from Aunt Mary Ann (McCreight). So, one day I said, “Aunt Lou, what was the worst disappointment of your life?” (Aunt Lou would have been age 57 at the time.) I waited dreamily to hear the stories. Which would it be? The shouting Methodist lover who had waited several years for her to become strong? The story of Robert, who she had worked so hard to win her back? (He had succeeded, and then his family had moved away. Next word they heard was that he had died at the age of 15). Or, the Campbellite youth from Peebles,” she surely would have married in spite of her delicate constitution, if he had been willing to “Come In” with the Covenanters.” Maybe it would be some secret lost love I had never heard of.
She looked thoughtful for a moment and I could hardly wait for the story. Then she said, “Well, to tell the absolute truth, my greatest disappointment has happened more than once —- a bad baking of salt rising bread!” The more I thought it over, the more I firmly believed she was telling the “absolute truth,” for Aunt Lou was very realistic. (I would have loved to meet Aunt Lou!)
One ex-Gaileyite, my Uncle Cargill Wickerham, (only son of John Milligan & Eleanor (Ralston) Wickerham and the brother of Victoria and Aunt Lou) could not become reconciled to so much change in the church. He sold his farm and they moved within bounds of one of the old orders of Covenanter churches in 1909. (They relocated to Logan County, Ohio, a very popular location for people of the Covenanter faith. A lot of Covenanters from Adams County had left and moved to Logan County over the years.) (We will learn more about Cargill and his family in later stories.)
By this time practically all the old outward peculiarities that had come down from ancient times when all had been Covenanters had disappeared from the Tranquility church —— whether for better or for worse spiritually, only God knows.
As I look back on this (Tranquility) church of my childhood and early youth, I feel sure in my own judgment that none of the inward qualities that gave them the real right to be numbered among God’s peculiar people,
had been lost. I feel sure those differences dragged out in the open gave no comfort to any enemy of Christianity. All were solidly bound together on the essential creed of Christianity, “Ye must be born again,” as in the orthodox world today. Then, there may have been a more narrowed horizon. But it was and is a free way of a free people.
Few today have ever heard of those staunch old Steelites and Gaileyites of “The Ridge” and elsewhere, but the Spirit that animated them will live on in God’s chosen ones no matter by what name they may be called.
With this, the author, Lena (McCoy) Mathews ends her book entitled “Lets Keep Their Memory Green.” The book begins circa 1796 with the settling of the “The Ridge” (Nichols Ridge in Adams County, Ohio) and continues over the next 100 plus years. I hope you have enjoyed hearing the tales of those generations as well as those of her own childhood. Next week I would like to share with you some highlights of Lena McCoy’s life as she reaches adulthood and has a family of her own.