TWO WORLDS
Since moving to Marshall I have tried to stay in two worlds. I live in Marshall but twice a week I return to the Swannanoa Valley where I lived for 50 years. I go to the old men’s coffee at 10 on Fridays at McDonalds to keep in touch with old friends, most of whom live on College View Drive where my wife Kathe and I were at rooted. And then on Sunday I got to church at the Warren Wilson Presbyterian Church on the Warren Wilson College campus where Kathe was an active church member, and after church I go out eat lunch with a bunch of church ladies, half of whom I have known for fifty years.
This Sunday was a special Sunday. This Sunday was we celebrated the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Warren Wilson Presbyterian Church with a special program recounting the history of the church with an accompanying slide show. I was one of the three narrators of the slide show, playing the part of a Warren Wilson faculty member. The script from which I read was interesting. Warren Wilson College, now selling itself as a cutting edge environmental school with a new Master’s degree preparing for jobs in the new economy, was founded as the Asheville Farm School in 1894 to provide a basic education for rural Appalachian mountain children at a time when public schools were mostly one room school houses with unqualified teachers and when most mountain boys were pulled out of school at 10 or 11 to work on the family farm. At the Asheville Farm School, on 400 acres of farm and forest, boys were taught reading, writing and arithmetic, with all of the farm work being done by student work crews. With work and learning was a strong dose of the Bible and encouragement to serve others. The triad—academia, work, service—are still core to learning at WWC in spite of the enormous shift in the student body and the rapidly changing world that students enter.
Faith was important. In the first years of Warren Wilson Farm School students walked to Riceville Presbyterian Church, 2 1/2 miles away, every Sunday, then a church was begun on campus in classroom or parlors, then a log cabin church/theater/assembly hall was built with student labor, and finally, completed the year before I arrived at Warren Wilson, a beautiful A frame church, the present church, was built with mostly student and staff labor.
When I arrived, because of the coming of public schools to the mountains, Warren Wilson had shifted to being a junior college, still catering to mountain children, but only a few year’s later, because of the coming of inexpensive community colleges to the mountains, Warren Wilson became a 4 year college which it is to this day.’
A Thanksgiving tradition begun in the 1930’s was for the farm crew to decorate the church by turning the front of the church into a farmyard with pigs and shucks of corn and sometimes chickens. The church was beautifully transformed this morning. I am including a few photographs.
All of this was in the script that I was given to read, a reminder of how rapidly the world, even my little part of it, has changed in my lifetime. It was a special day.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 