By Colleen Nelson
Love at first sight? When it comes to Crabapple Community Church the answer is absolutely! White as a starched doily, it’s a fine sight to come across while driving wild and wonderful Wheeling Creek Road. The three building cluster sits pretty as a Christmas card on a grassy bend, its back against a rocky overhang so close to the creek you can hear it. The open space in front says come on in, the community hall, set back even closer to the creek, is cozy enough to bring the whole family for a reunion. The last building could be the parsonage, I’m thinking, but it looks empty. I won’t be able to go to church here this month, I realize with a pang, but standing here feeling the power of the living waters of the south fork of Wheeling Creek and the presence of nature all around me, I suddenly want to know – who goes here?
A bunch of phone calls later I finally meet up with Margaret “Everybody calls me Dale” Rhome. It turns out I already know at least one favorite person. (Hi Carol Andrew! Dale tells me this is where you and Chuck got married! Sweet!)
We stand at a respectful social distance in front of Dale’s house a few doors down from Nancy Burn’s retired greenhouse on State Rt. 21. Dale is holding on to her walker, a tube of Clorox wipes and a church pamphlet – “I’m 88 years old and my nephew is all worried about the virus!” I’m holding out a Greene County Calendar that features Dale’s sister-in-law Helena Galentine as the November calendar girl. We’ve already talked on the telephone; I’ve already stopped by to photograph the photograph she has of a gathering at the church in the mid 1990s. We’re already new best friends. “I was secretary at the church for years!” she tells me. “Me and my kids and Lillie Barney – she was a Godly woman! – pulled nails out of boards so we could build that church!” The people in Dale’s prized photo are most of 100 plus congregation that found spiritual strength in Brother Frank Crow’s preaching and built Crabapple Church out of recycled wood and frontier faith. Many members have passed, some few remain but they all have wonderful stories to tell and Dale knows them all.
The building I assumed was the parsonage is actually the old Crabapple school where the faithful had been gathering since 1900, according to the history in the pamphlet Dale was about to loan me. “We sat on seats from a theater instead of pews and there was a big stove in the middle that burned coal.”
Brother Frank’s passion for the Lord brought him from his home in Moundsville, WV to Crabapple in 1964 to preach as a layman in the old school house. Dale tells me the congregation began to grow as people came to to hear his true tales of salvation and the old school smarts that helped him walk the straight and narrow once he saw the Light.
When Brother Frank had the vision to build a new place of worship beside the old school, there were picnics along the creek as families prepped the recycled wood and a handful of able-bodied men built the church. It was finished in 1967, the year Brother Frank became ordained as a nondenominational minister. He would be their shepherd for the next 20 years. That’s him with white hair sitting in the front row of Dale’s photograph, beside preacher Jimmy Jarvis, who filled in after Brother Frank retired and now preaches at the Church of Grace in Rogersville.
