Mount Olive UMC
by Bryan Spellman
Title
Mount Olive UMC
Artist
Bryan Spellman
Medium
Photograph - Photography
Description
My parents, like my grand-parents, my great-grandparents and my great-great grandparents were born and raised in the Mountain State, West Virginia. As my father was finishing his seminary work at Boston University in 1946, he was recruited by a District Superintendent from Montana who said "Why do you want to go back to West Virginia? There's a Methodist Church on every street corner. Come out to Montana where we have wide-open spaces and need people to fill them." Somehow that appealed tomy father, and that fall, my parents said good-bye to friends and family and moved west. Three years later I was born, a native Montanan, but my roots go deep in the soil of West Virginia where most of my blood relatives still live.
On my trips to visit family, I love to get on the back roads and photograph the scenery. And yes, that D.S. was right. Everywhere I look there's a Methodist Church, like the Mount Olive UMC on a narrow dirt road outside of Jarvisville in rural Harrison County. This strikes me as a quintessentially West Virginia Scene. My father served a church in Jarvisville while he was in college, but not this one. At that time, the early 1940s, this church was United Brethren, not Methodist.
Uploaded
September 6th, 2023
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Comments (1)
Holly April Harris
Wonderful photo! I am very pleased to feature your wonderful artwork in the group ‘Appalachia America.’ Please add it to the “2023 Third Quarter FEATURED IMAGE Collection” thread in the discussions area to record and display your image amongst the best in the group. Thank you! 9/13/23