Friday, April 10, 2009
Catawba Valley Baptist rooted in family history
Donald Burton. — Courtesy of Ann Burton
Priscilla Richardson is columnist The Botetourt View. You can contact her at 981-3430 or via e-mail.
Priscilla Richardson
Recent columns
When you've reached the age of 150 you feel the need to celebrate. That's what has happened at the Catawba Valley Baptist Church. Located almost to the Craig County line on Catawba Road and thriving, the church isn't satisfied with just one party. They are celebrating all year long. They invited me to one of the opening salvos, a men's breakfast. They'll continue with a youth day in April and other events later in the year.
One life-long member, Catawba's Donald Burton, knows what it was like to live in an isolated mountainous area. He was born at home, but his mother, Flora Horne Burton, died when he was only ten days old. So he grew up with his grandfather Horne. Seventy-two years later he still lives nearby.
"We farmed," he explained. "There's no need for flat land to farm when you have horses. You only need flat land when you use machines, tractors. We only had room for one horse, a neighbor had one. When we needed a team we would join up. People shared in those days." They would go to Roanoke to sell on the market, and "on the way back we'd stop at Ikenberry's for most of our groceries."
Life at home presented challenges as there was no electricity in their home until about 1940. "I was born in 1936. I hadn't started to school yet, so when they put the pole for electricity near my house, I wanted to watch it. So my aunt held me on her lap so I could watch. And it was a long time before we got a telephone."
Burton went to school at Haymakertown in a four-room school house through the seventh grade. Then he moved on to Fincastle for high school. The dirt roads the school bus had to use weren't paved. He remembers a farmer using a team of horses to pull his school bus out of the mud. "There was a two-room schoolhouse nearby that was torn down before I remember it. My mother, uncle, and aunts went to school there."
Burton's wife, Ann Brickey, went to Fincastle High too, though they didn't start dating until later. They married when he was 21, and then they had two children. Although their son died at age 13, their daughter Lonna lives in Blacksburg and comes to the church every Sunday to serve as the music director.
Having graduated, Burton needed a job. "But to get a job I had to have a car. So my aunt who had the property next to ours gave me her pulp wood. I cut it and sold it to Mead Westvaco. Had a neighbor in the hauling business to haul it." He used the proceeds from this sale as a down payment on his first vehicle and got his first job. He ended up as a security officer at Catawba Hospital for 12 years before his retirement.
The members aren't the only ones with family history at Catawba. The pastor, Catawba's Chris Kingery, 36, told me, "My grandmother and her dad and his brothers all were baptized here in the creek across the road." And he's working hard to get the entire neighborhood into the church, along with doing foreign mission work.
And speaking of missions, a special guest at this breakfast was their former pastor Daleville's Carl Collins, 94. Now fully retired after several attempted retirements when this church wouldn't let him quit, he took many groups on missions to Africa, Brazil, China and Africa. He enjoys talking about his times in foreign mission work. But 150-year-old Catawba Valley Baptist Church has a special place in his heart. "I keep coming back," he said.
