While writing the post about Pilgrim Church last week, I was tempted to go in several different directions. I’ll explore some of those different directions today.
In that post I included a picture of the replica of the original log cabin church, which sits 50 or so yards from the “new” church. The new church was, I believe, built in the 1920’s or 30’s, and is not much fancier than the cabin.
The replica is a log cabin with dirt floors. The pews are simple split logs, flat-side up, with four legs. Someone once told me that these pews came from the original church. Given the humidity in East Texas, it’s hard to imagine anything wooden lasting 170 years, but I believed it then. The pulpit was a simple wooden podium, which was about to fall down twenty years ago. The state of Texas maintains the site, so there’s probably a new one by now. And, of course, there is a fireplace for heat in the winter. As I hinted at before, this building provided a great place for my sister and me to play.
The new church is made of bricks and has a wooden floor. There’s electricity, but I think it was an after-thought. The front of the church has a large door, and there are two doors at the back—one on either side of the pulpit. Both sides of the church are lined with windows. The doors, windows, and a few fifty-year-old ceiling fans cool the church in the summer. There is not, nor ever was, nor ever will be, plumbing in the church. So yes, even though I am only (almost) 35, I have used an outhouse.
When we first started going to Pilgrim, the outhouses we used were probably those built when the “new” church was built, if not those built by Daniel Parker himself. I liked them because they looked just like the ones on Little House on the Prairie. Because we had to go down an overgrown trail through the woods, and because they were a favorite hang-out for Daddy Long-legs, my mother and little sister did not like them. But, alas, everything changes. When I was about 10, the soft, modern, spoiled men of our church thought that we needed new outhouses. These were a little larger, and the men built them with plywood—a product that wasn’t available when Daniel Parker built the predecessors. This ruined the Little House on the Prairie look.
I’ve described what these services were like when I wrote about another Primitive Baptist Church. I also described what the meals were like. As for the people, they were simple, old-fashioned, poor country people, much like you still find in rural areas in the south. When we were at Pilgrim, it was easy, especially for a boy, to imagine that only a few generations had passed since Daniel Parker had started the church in the 1830’s.
I should mention that, according to Texas History, Pilgrim Church was the first non-Catholic church in Texas territory (Texas was not a state in 1833). And although the founder, Daniel Parker, held some strange views, the doctrines of grace have been preached at Pilgrim for over 170 years.