It's like a movie, a set piece from a show like The Music Man, set right here in Iowa. Pioneer days, 1865: a steam engine is belching a plume so thick you can hike on it as it pulls a string of cars through eastern Iowa's rolling hills. Aboard a flat car sits a church bell, sturdily strapped to prevent carnage.
That bell attracts a crowd, so whenever the engine blasts out a warning to the town down the pike, people come off wooden sidewalks to have a look--and to listen. A whole crowd of rubber-neckers have heard about that bell, so it's run in every country hamlet.
It happened--or if it didn't, it should have. People say that bell rang melodiously all the way along to a destination that's no longer there, a village called Bradford, a town just then departing, as so many had to--when the railroad determined to stop in a nearby town, this time a village named Nashua.
That church bell finally came home to the people who'd bought it, the pioneer members of a little brown church in the vale.
Yes, that "little brown church in the vale," the one that would be a sweet little myth if you couldn't, yet this afternoon, drive by the place and stop for a wedding. Four of them went on the afternoon I stopped. Someone's always getting hitched within those four brown walls. Why brown?--the people were poor; they couldn't afford white.
Truth be told, the church would be no more if it weren't for that old song, a piece recorded by Alabama, The Statler Brothers, The Carter Family, the Gaither Family, Charlie Pride, not to mention Dolly Parton, and Andy Griffith and his hapless sidekick Don Knotts. Dozens of others too. They all wanted a piece of it, all of them.
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| William S. Pitts |
Now get this. That beloved old hymn was written before that little brown church existed. Nothing Twilight Zone about this--hark. William S. Pitts was aboard a stagecoach when it stopped at little Bradford, a town that no longer exists, strolled through the wildwoods, and decided right he'd write a song for church that wasn't there but darn well should be.
Imagine the shock Mr. William S. Pitts must have felt when he happened to return a few years later, accompanied his music students, and found that mythical hymn was not at all mythical. There a church stood, a little brown church in the vale.
In had to be one of the most stunning musical moments in Iowa history, Mr. Pitts the music teacher wanders in and, right then and there, stands in front of his students and sings a composition of his he'd never sung in public before. If you dared believe in what can't possibly be true, you might be tempted to say that the sweet old hymn conjured the church where it was first sung. I'm not making this up.
The town of Bradford is long gone, as is Mr. Pitts, whose bust should be in the pantheon of great Hawkeye musicians, just a shelf or two beneath Meredith Wilson and Simon Estes.
After all, the little brown church in the wildwood is a beehive of love, 75,000 weddings and counting. As I stood there one afternoon, families moved in at almost the same time as others left. The woman who manages the place, a smile-r if I ever knew one, whispered incessantly to me as we stood in the back, but never took her eyes off the action before her.
The organist never turned around. "How does she know when to play what?" I asked the manager. "Oh, you can believe we got ways," she said, smiling at families streaming in.
I don't know if that old bell rings anymore. I don't think I heard it. It would be more than 150 years old now, old as the little brown church itself.
Pitts is long gone, of course, even if his music will be recorded again soon, I'm sure, if it's not being recorded right now. The man's elegant circular portrait is up on the wall to your left when you walk in, one of those portraits with eyes that appear to follow you all around the sanctuary.
It's not scary. It's really kind of sweet. Even as we speak, the man is still right here in the church in the wildwood, as he was before it was even there.
Isn't that something?
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