The Very First Catholic Community

By Thea Jarvis

The tall white frame church sits just back from the two-lane in stately silence. She is tired now, a little lonely.

Her narrow, cracked windowpanes have watched the citizens of old Sharon in Taliaferro County, Georgia, pass by for the last hundred yeas.

Her worn, creaking steps have suffered the hurry-ups of countless pairs of shiny Sunday shoes. Her welcoming eaves have given shelter to myriad small, scurrying or flying creatures who come and go with the mellow seasons of middle Georgia.

The church is a little shaky on her once-sturdy foundation of staggered brick pillars, but she carries her bell-tower with grace, like a faded, cherished bonnet. Inside, her old wood-burning stove is a reminder of the warmth of times past. Her ancient organ still plays, but to a small congregation of seven or so on a Sunday morning.

First Catholic Church

The now-aging Church of the Purification is the younger sister of the first Catholic church in the state of Georgia, founded about one mile south of Sharon in Locust Grove. It is she who cradled the heritage of those early days of Catholicism within her fragile, muted doors.

History has it that Catholic settlers of English descent seeking greater religious freedom traveled to Georgia from Maryland around 1790. Their arrival in Locust Grove meant that the first community of Catholics had appeared in the state.

For their worship, they erected a crude but practical church built of logs gleaned from the surrounding woods. It is said that the people called their infant church “Maryland,” and to this church was sent a stalwart priest from Baltimore, Father John LeMoin.

The Settlement Grows

French settlers soon joined the little Catholic colony, fleeing the wrath of the revolution, and the Irish followed not far behind.

Schooling for their young was a priority for these early Georgia Catholics. Locust Grove Academy was established in 1818 and the Georgia Historical Commission cites it as the first chartered Roman Catholic Academy in the state. From its ranks came such notables as Alexander Stephens, the vice-president of the Confederacy.

After almost 30 years of service, the original log cabin church could no longer serve the burgeoning Locust Grove community. It was carefully dismantled and a frame church put up in 1821. By now, the church had become known as the Church of the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The new building was erected within the walls of the old Locust Grove Cemetery, not far from the site of the log church.

A Tangle of History

Though the original churches in Locust Grove are now lost to posterity, this cemetery still remains. A local journalist and historian, Mrs. Vinnie Williams, has described how the old burying ground appears to the late 20th century observer:

“Locust Grove Cemetery is a tangle of old fashioned running roses, remnants of flowering bulbs, bird song, scurrying lizards, blackberries and gentle silence.”

It is, also, a tangle of history. Its broken, battered headstones reveal the numbers brought down by the yellow fever epidemic that gripped Locust Grove in the first part of the 19th century.

The fever was stranger to no one in the early settlement. Since many of the French had by now moved away, Irish names predominate on the grave markers. Adults who had traveled to the South from Tipperary, young children--many from the same family--the parish priest, all are met here in this now-hidden resting place.

Time For Change

The Catholic population had been decimated by the cruel yellow fever. In addition, Protestant settlers were moving south, making inroads around Locust Grove by buying up the fertile plantations then thriving in Georgia. By 1852, the railroad had come through, leaving Locust Grove virtually isolated.

The time had come for change. The town of Sharon, and the close of the Civil War, offered the opportunity the early Catholics needed. Sharon was but a mile or so south of the original settlement. When the new church was put up in 1877, no doubt some of the lumber from the first frame Church of the Purification was used to shore up its walls and provide security for its members.

Student Memories

Sharon Catholics still required a school for their young. In 1878, the Sisters of St. Joseph came to Sharon and began the Sacred Heart School for Boys, located next to the Church of the Purification.

Bernard Darden, a lifetime Sharon resident now in his seventies, was a student at Sacred Heart many years ago.

“The school was in a big pine thicket,” he remembered on a fine fall day in sleepy Sharon. “It had 12 grades and those sisters were strict! They had long hickory rods that were well-seasoned. If you didn’t’ do what they said, you’d get it.”

The firm discipline was reinforced by high academic standards. “You had to know it--you couldn’t skim through,” according to Darden.

Sacred Heart is gone now. But its simple beginnings later flowered into a place well-loved by Georgia Catholics.

“Around 1945,” recalled Bernard Darden, the sisters sold their property. Some in their order moved to Washington, Georgia, and affiliated with a school there, which later became an orphanage--St. Joseph’s. It is this institution which moved to southwest Atlanta in 1967 and is presently known as the Village of St. Joseph.

From Prosperity to Decline

The band of Catholics in Sharon were to see their little town prosper. It was incorporated in 1894, giving it status and respectability. From the surrounding plantations, cotton was brought to Sharon to be shipped north via rail. The town was developing into a thriving railroad center. The Catholic settlers had seemingly chosen their site well.

But successful growth was not to continue in Sharon forever. The boll weevil brought destruction to the cotton crop that sustained the Georgia farmers. Plantations died out; people moved away.

In present-day Sharon, there are only memories of what the town once was. Once-thriving storefronts on the main streets have been torn down, vacated, boarded up.

Bernard Darden, formerly the executive vice-president of the Bank of Sharon, remembered with pride the “wide open stores always doing business” that he knew in years past.

“There used to be farmers all over the area,” claimed Darden, whose great-great-grandfather came to Georgia from Virginia. “But people had to move away--especially the young people--just to get jobs.”

The population of Sharon has now dwindled to about 150. The town’s outlying areas are given over to cattle raising and timber growing. The Locust Grove land still owned by the Catholic Church is leased to a pulpwood company and only the old cemetery remains as a wistful reminder of what once was.

But the Church of the Purification in Sharon--that younger sister of the Locust Grove family--carries on, albeit at a slower pace than before.

Itinerant Oblate

Father Bill McGrath, an Oblate of Mary Immaculate born in Lowell, Mass., lives at Queen of the Angels Church in Thomson and celebrates Mass in Sharon each Sunday and first Friday.

“We get about seven people, sometimes less, on a Sunday. Most are in their 60s,” said Father McGrath, who at age 61 travels the back roads of rural Georgia and claims that the roads are “better than in the Philippines,” where he spent 25 years journeying by horse and jeep.

With his companion Midnight, an amiable English sheepdog who proves his loyalty by following the peripatetic priest wherever he goes, Father McGrath is a familiar figure to the Catholic families in Sharon. Midnight serves as Purification’s official welcomer, greeting Sunday churchgoers with a woof and a wag.

Of the present-day Catholics who gather for Sabbath services in the old white frame church, at least three families can trace their roots back three and four generations to the early Irish settlers.

First Families

“Mrs. B.M. Bracey was a Kealy,” Bernard Darden pointed out, “and Mrs. Leon Ray is from the O’Keefe family.” The Kealys, the O’Keefes and Darden’s own ancestors can be traced back to the founding families of Locust Grove and Sharon.

How does a latter day Sharon Catholic feel about the changes he has witnessed in the church community over his own lifetime?

“I hate to see our little church dry, but you can’t do anything about it--some have died, some have moved away,” Bernard Darden reflected. “But even in the best days, Catholics were in the minority. We never have been predominant, except maybe when Locust Grove was first founded.”

Though Catholics are now smaller in number, the spirit of that first Catholic settlement in Georgia still haunts the hollows of old Sharon.

For the discerning eye, the overgrown cemetery, full of lichen-covered gravestones, the matriarchal church with her paint peeling and her stairs creaking, the wild fields where schoolchildren once bawled at noon recess, all hold the magic of a mystical past.

It is a past that can be recaptured for generations of Georgia Catholics in old Sharon--a town with a history that is hidden, but a heart that is not.