Saturday, June 03, 2017

Historic Pews & Pulpits Ramble: My upcoming excursion

The Warren County Chamber of Commerce is hosting a historic church tour in eastern rural Georgia. I signed up with a friend and I'm so excited! Here is what it involves:
Georgia's Classic South Region is hosting a historic church tour called the Historic Pews and Pulpits Ramble on June 16, 2017. The bus will depart from the Greensboro Home Depot at 9 a.m. and go through rural east Georgia. There will be seven stops along the way to tour historic churches tucked away but not forgotten. Not only will you get to go inside the churches and hear about their humble beginnings, you'll be inspired by songs and words from some of the chancels and pulpits.
At each stop there will be a 30-minute presentation of the history of the church, the area, and some hymns. The Sacred Harp Singers of Atlanta will be part of the presentation at Wrightsboro Methodist Church!

Here are the 7 churches we will be visiting on the Heritage Tour:

Mount Zion Presbyterian Church, Sparta
Powelton Methodist Church Sparta
Antioch Baptist Church, Crawfordville
Wrightsboro Methodist Church, Thomson
Barnett Methodist Church, Norwood
Locust Grove Catholic Church, Crawfordville
Penfield Baptist Church, Union Point

Some of the churches are two hundred years old...the one with the towers was built by freed slaves...some are still in use, others in disrepair...it's exciting and interesting. I've never been to this part of Georgia so it all will be new.


The tour goes from 9-3 on a Friday in mid-June. There will be lots and lots of photo opportunities the write-up says and I can see that this is true. I will need to bring lots of batteries for my camera!

I haven't gone on a tour or excursion in almost ten years, so I'm very excited for this. Pray for good weather on June 16!

Information about Harp Singing, AKA Shape Note Singing, this historic form of singing hymns unique to the south (though it flowered briefly in New England prior to the Revolutionary War, it died out and was revived down south). Here are a few photos I took of a Harp Singing in Athens at the Botanical Gardens from 2007,



Yippee!

4 comments:

Grace to You said...

My son and I prayed for good weather for you on Friday for a couple of weeks - how was it?? Hope you had a wonderful time!

Elizabeth Prata said...

Thank you for the prayers! It was supposed to rain, but it held off. So thank you! It was great. I took over 200 pictures. They gave us a large volume of historical information too. I've been trying to figure out how to put a lot of photos on one blog essay into a slide show or something, but apparently on Blogger you can't. PictoBrowser used to work but it doesn't anymore. So I've been overwhelmed with how to distill it all! I would take this tour again, or any tour of this kind,. They organized it SO well.

Grace to You said...

So glad to hear you had a great time!!

Still no purging of art supplies going on around here, but I have a free day this week for the first time in weeks - if you think of it, pray I will get that done and get them to you!

Elizabeth Prata said...

Thanks Grace To You! I pray you can get more than one free day in weeks next time! :)