06/23/08

Here are more Cades Cove pics down below... These are of the churches we passed along the trail road. We stopped at the Primitive Baptist and Methodist churches. It was kind of neat, though, to see that our church here was older than those. Ours started in 1802 and is still going strong for the Lord. I am thankful for that heritage. As I walked into the churches I tried to imagine what the services would have been like there.

I realize you will be seeing a lot of pictures of graveyards/ gravestones. It seems I have a "fascination" of photographing them... old ones, that is. I guess it is because I see the lives of people right in front of me that lived a long time ago... the day they were born and the day they died. It causes me to stop and think about the "dash"... the little line between those two dates. How I use that "dash" in my lifetime will be how people remember me. It is a humbling thought, actually. We only have one life to live. Are we living it for the Lord and for the right reasons? That always makes me think when I see them.

It is also interesting to see how young some of those people died. There were a lot of graves for infants. I know many of them may have died from pneumonia or such things as that. Daddy used to talk about how some of his siblings died from that in the 1920's. (Daddy was the youngest of ten) There was one section in particular that was quite sad... a family had buried three infants in a short span of years. Imagine the heartache. Modern medicine can do so much more than they had at the time. I am thankful to the Lord for the abilities He gives men and women to know what to do in these days.

The one grave marker shows the two people who were the first white settlers in Cades Cove. There were a lot of Olives buried in the cemeteries. I also had to chuckle at the other marker I had photographed up close. It showed one man had been "murdered by North Carolina rebels..." Hmmm... I am thinking he was for the Union Side, huh? It was just funny how they worded it on his marker. Of course, if I had been a family member at the time and felt the way they did, I may have done the same thing. There were some graves that only had stones or slabs of slate as their marker. I took a picture of that area but you can't tell very much by it. Many of the gravestones were VERY old and hard to read. They had placed "newer" markers by those so we could read about them. The other markers I thought interesting were ones of twins. The one twin died in infancy while the other died in recent years. They tried to make their headstones look similar after all of those years.

The picture inside of the church is of Wesley taking a rest on the pew. I was amazed at the amount of carving and writing on the walls by visitors. It made me irritated, actually. I couldn't believe people would be that disrespectful of property, but then again, maybe that shouldn't surprise me in this day and time. When new things are not respected and taken care of why do I expect old "out of date" things to be respected? It was truly a shame to see.... and we saw it in many places around our travels.

The second church we saw was the Methodist Church. You will notice that there are two doors. The plans were drawn up like that because they used to have the women come in one side and the men in the other. This church, however, did not abide by that. They only did the two doors because they borrowed the plans from a church that did. From what I understood they used both doors but men and women alike entered either one they wanted. It is quite funny to hear of some of the things they used to do or say.

Hope you enjoyed this installment of Cades Cove pictures.... there will be more tomorrow. ha!