Historic Rural Churches of Georgia by Sonny Seals and George S.Hart, foreword by Jimmy Carter

It's a wonderful, important, heavy, precious tome Historic Rural   Churches of Georgia by Sonny Seals and George S.Hart, foreword curated by ex Former President Jimmy Carter published in association with Georgia Humanities by Georgia University Press.

I asked for this book because I live in a countryside and our church is a rural one and when I can immerse myself in the green I am always happy!

The main sensation that this book will present you when you will open it? A big tranquillity, a great peace, derived by a harmony of environment, people (you will imagine them) and places lost in an undefined time, and in grade to penetrate violently in your soul for restoring it and staying there at long, trust me.

The book speaks of Sundays Masses, people and communities.
Also during difficult times, hard work in the fields, a hardest life if compared at the one we are living in now, these religious christian communities, Baptists, Catholics, Methodists, Lutherans, found proudly time for God.

These ones in the book can be rural black churches, or rural white churches, the cult and cure for these sacred places the same one: precious, intense and felt. (Churches of black and white were separated because of racial problems in the past.)

Each of these rural churches has an iconic start, an iconic beginning and a great, little story behind. A pastor desired to build a church supported by the entire community; the community asking for a church.
Every church speaks of a precise historic moment and every church has an important story behind. Every church speaks of a precise, defined christian community.
All these rural churches although now most of the time closed are very well-preserved and remembered. Some of these churches restored just in very recent years; other ones still in function for special events, other ones property of some privates, a rural church still opened in the 1980s with a community of 81 members.

Why a rural church was so important in the past?
In general the desire from the emigrants of having a place where finding God, where praying God with dignity where staying together also for some moments exchanging the latest news of their little corner of the world where they lived in was felt as a necessity. A church meant this and more in the Old World like in the New One.

You breath all the warm of the purest South reading the various stories of these rural churches and the little cemeteries close to them admiring the beautiful, stunning pictures of this book, inspired by a divine touch.

There are cemeteries where the most eminent people seen in all the magnificence of their graves; there are cemeteries where there are still the graves of the founders of the congregations; you will see gravestones of soldiers of the Secession War (1861-1865).
Yes: people in rural Georgia rest seriously  in peace in these little cemeteries where memory is preserved like a relic.
These cemeteries gives a sensation of peace, of relaxation.

Like a big city, also rural towns tell the story of a State, sometimes with a most vibrant intensity.
Like for all the territories of the USA, you will read an articulated story of the creation of the State of Georgia. Territories were Native Americans and slowly they became property of the white man, let's use this expression and the last ones of giving up the tribe of Cherokee.

Most of these rural churches built at the end of 1700.
Each rural church "illustrated with words" and then with  wonderful pictures for recreate the magic of the past and the beauty of the present: a calm sensation of being in a place of peace beloved by everyone.

I have seen just a church in bad condition in this book, strangely one of the most recent ones from the end of 1800.

All the other ones have great dignity, and they remain special sanctuaries and guardians of a territory. Some of these churches have separate entrances for men and women and some of them still the spring-fed baptismal pool, some are brick constructions.

But why this interest for these peculiar churches?

The authors at first were searching for their origins and the idea started to take shape thanks to this reason: they thought that searching for rural churches would have been captivating. A rural church was the center of the aggregation of an entire community.

The authors opened a Facebook page, asked for information and received a lot of pictures, suggestions.

Ex Former President Jimmy Carter lived in Plains. It was a real emotion reading his foreword because I read Christmas in Plains , in 2003, it was a Christmas gift from Constance and Bert an American family from the South who bought a house in our corner of the world. As also President Carter remarked in little rural places schools and churches the only buildings presenting to people life and community.

Times changed customs and most of the people who spent their life in rural places preferred to abandon these lands for searching for a best life maybe in a big city, but these rural churches and their cemeteries remain for report to everyone the story of a solid past, of solid people with values, of ancestors still whispering their little or big "Spoon River" in the closest cemeteries.

This book can be according to my point of view a great start for a trip in the most profound, real and rural Georgia.



I thank Georgia University Press for the physical copy of this book.



Anna Maria Polidori