When I got back from my vacation this summer there was a package on my desk addressed to the Church Historian. It was an old fashioned scrapbook of youth activities from the 50’s and 60’s. There are carefully arranged programs from “Rally Days,” and Youth Sundays, and lots of tiny black and white photos of young people decorating Christmas trees and acting silly. Several people have flipped though the pages in the last few weeks and remembered the people in the pictures and told me stories about who they were and where they have gone.

I thought the most interesting thing in the book was a penciled note on the back of a program from the Senior High Fellowship Rally of the Presbytery of Potomac from May of 1959. I’m not sure which church in our presbytery they were worshiping in, but one of the young people from Leesburg wrote this to her neighbor:

Notice how pretty and how it differs from ours? Why must ours always

be so plain? I swear all the other Pres. Churches are beautiful and ours

is so dinky and not the least bit ornate—it’s all the fault of those old people…

It is the fault of all those old people. Those old people treasured the history of this place and made sure that it would remain standing for that generation and for those of us who have come long after. Those old people started an endowment fund to keep the sanctuary dinky and not the least bit ornate. A young woman came in this week to ask about planning a wedding and she just gasped when she walked into the sanctuary. She just said over and over, “It’s so very charming.” It is charming. The ancient walls just seem to echo the generations of prayers that have been said here. Is it that our tastes have changed so much from 1959 that we can now appreciate the colonial simplicity of the place; or, do young people often see beauty in what others have and fail to appreciate what is around them every day?

I’m not sure what to do with this scrapbook. We don’t have a church historian. The MAs group spent some time last year at the Balch library learning about archiving material; and they have begun to conserve some of our old pictures. But those young mothers are not the ones who can identify the pictures and remember the stories that need to be preserved around here. It’s very odd that such a historic church doesn’t have a Historian to display the interesting old things that we have and help us gather up what we need to be saving today. The Session has recognized this need, and has asked the Property Committee to try to establish a committee interested in preserving our heritage. No one has indicated an interest. Isn’t there anyone who feels called to this particular task?

Come by the office and take a look at this scrapbook. 

                                                      - Diane