IUKA – Hanging beside each of the stained glass windows in the sanctuary of Iuka United Methodist Church is a picture of a grave.

The snapshots lead members to a cedar-shaded cemetery, just northwest of the church, where the people whose names are on the windows are buried. Those names, including Jourdan, Coman and Doan, preside over the ancient church like guardian angels.

“We started researching them about a year ago,” said the Rev. Jon Kaufman, the church’s 57th pastor, describing his congregation’s efforts to pull together the threads of its 150-year history.

“We’re calling it ‘Windows to the Past,’” he said. As he spoke a train whistle rose in the distance, a sound that, since the Memphis and Charleston Railroads united in 1857, has meant prosperity and growth for the small town.

Kaufman sat in a bright room, overlooking a lawn shaded by Bradford pear and magnolia trees. Frank Thomas and his 92-year-old mother, Billie Burke Thomas, talked about the long span of the church’s history and how they might begin to describe it.

“She was the prettiest woman I ever saw,” said Billie Burke Thomas, describing Ygondene Gaines, her childhood Sunday school teacher.

The group’s conversation evoked images of the natural springs welling up from the ground across the tracks, springs whose medicinal qualities once attracted the Chickasaw chief for whom the town is named.

“It’s been a place of healing, of comfort, ever since those wounded soldiers in the Civil War – Union and Confederate – came through its doors,” said Kaufman.

“That’s what a church is, isn’t it? A place of healing.”

Remarkable care

The founding members of Iuka United Methodist Church came to the intersection of the railroads in 1859, mostly from the town of Eastport to the northeast, and from New Hope to the southwest.

They built their church without the wide front door to which most people today are accustomed. The sexes didn’t sit together in those days, so they made an entrance on the right side for men and one on the left for women.

For years the church didn’t have a regular pastor because all the men were away fighting in the Civil War. Most pastoral duties fell to men like William McKnight, a layman who made the rounds and sometimes took the wounded into his home.

On a recent Monday afternoon, church member Debbie Brown drove into the center of Oak Grove Cemetery. She pointed to a grave in McKnight’s personal plot, the resting place of a young soldier the minister had buried near him.

“Isn’t that remarkable?” said Brown. “The soldier died so far from home. They say that’s the kind of man McKnight was.”

A few feet away was the grave of G.P. Hammerly, a Civil War vet whose name is inscribed below the church’s stained glass window depicting Christ as the Good Shepherd. Nearby, an obelisk marked the resting place of John M. Stone, a church member and later governor and president of Mississippi Agricultural and Mechanical College. The college later became Mississippi State University.

Throughout the cemetery the graves of church members read like milestones on the road of the nation’s history.

A few blocks away, in a house that sits on the lot where Gen. Nathan Bedford Forrest once had his headquarters, Bettye Brown spoke of the past.

“We had buckets of ice in the church and fans blowing over them to cool us,” said Brown, remembering her wedding in the church before the advent of air-conditioning to the South.

A smoky, black-and-white photograph from 1934 shows Brown as a maid of honor in the church’s “Tom Thumb Wedding,” an old Southern practice where children dressed up as a mock bridal party to raise funds.

Every Sunday morning Brown, whose family have been members of the church for six generations, still listens to hear the ringing of the old church bell that was original to the building.

Going forward

Debbie Brown picked up a tattered hymnal titled “Living Songs,” dated 1894. The pages showed words but no music. Back then song leaders had to “line” the hymns, singing the words and melodies together as an example for the congregation to follow.

When Iuka United Methodist celebrates its 150th anniversary Sunday, its members won’t need to line the hymns, but music will serve as an entrée to the past. Frank Thomas will lead the choir in a song his brother wrote titled “The Window,” which tells about the Good Shepherd image dedicated to Hammerly.

On a recent Sunday, as part of a prelude to the anniversary, guest vocalist Debbie Kines rattled the boards of the ancient church with a soul-squeezing medley of hymns like “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” and “What a Friend We Have in Jesus.”

After services Frank Bledsoe and his wife, Sandy, who invited Kines to sing, recalled what brought them to Iuka from Virginia nine years ago.

“Of course the beautiful lake had a lot to do with it,” said Sandy. The small-town warmth of the congregation made it an easy decision.

The church’s membership has spiked periodically over the years, coinciding with the expansion of the Tennessee-Tombigbee Waterway, and with government industry coming to town, as when TVA started building a nuclear power plant in the ‘70s.

The Rev. Prentiss Gordon was Iuka’s pastor when NASA was building a solid rocket motor plant in the ‘90s.

“A lot of success in ministry is timing,” said Gordon. “Those were good years.”

As in many places today, unemployment is a problem in Tishomingo County and much of the church’s ministry is geared toward addressing poverty, such as supporting the Good Samaritan Food Pantry and by participating in a cooperative ministry with several other Methodist churches in the area.

There isn’t an abundance of youth in the church, but they are a happy few. Jenna Cutshall, now a student at Ole Miss, spoke fondly of youth group trips to Camp Lake Stephens, as well as Christmas caroling and even liturgical dance teams.

“We were all close and devoted to furthering our relationship with Christ,” she said.

Many youngsters moved away after college but some, like pharmacist Chris Cornelison, 36, have come back to raise their families in the church.

“My parents were members here and this has always been my family and my home,” said the father of two who’s excited about small groups that will start soon.

On a late Monday afternoon, rain clouds closed in over the church’s weather vane, one that Billie Burke Thomas’ husband, Ed, replaced after the original was struck by lightning in 1973 – during a revival, nonetheless.

The Rev. Jon Kaufman decided to skip his daily walk, which would take him down the main drag of Iuka, past the old brick buildings on Main Street.

“Through war and depression, we’ve seen what God has done through his beloved sons and daughters,” he said, looking at the sky.

“The present connects with the past. It’s not hard. It’s actually a real simple thing.”

Contact Daily Journal religion editor Galen Holley at 678-1510 or galen.holley@djournal.com