The Old Bear Creek Cemetery tabernacle and graveyard a few years after the 2011 Bear Creek Fire.The metal items except for the poles are now gone. But once the tabernacle was a major meeting place.
It’s hard to imagine but the major Bear Creek Fire of 2011 crossed this Bear Creek grave yard and melted items on top and side of tombstones.
This grave shed in Old Bear Creek Cemetery years ago is gone now. But there may be a few others in the county.A grave shed would cover grave mounds with low structures to protect the site from weathering.
The tabernacle at the old Bear Creek Cemetery in its day was an important community meeting place well off in the woods.This one lasted until the Bear Creek Fire of 2011.
WHERE IS IT?
This week’s Where Is It? mystery is a real mystery. The object is not there anymore. The Bear Creek Fire of 2011 took it. All that is left is some metal framework and a rustic, grassy cemetery with numerous leaning and fallen headstones.
It’s a tabernacle. The Bear Creek Cemetery Tabernacle which once was here is the answer to this week’s mystery. The memory of the way things once were is the story, so here it goes.
This old Bear Creek Cemetery once had a fine tabernacle, the last one in Cass County after the Mount of Blessing Tabernacle closed in Atlanta.
The tabernacle was a religious meeting place much like a brush arbor but bigger and with a roof. It was an open-sided building made of white wood and places inside to sit. This one is rather hard to find some miles south of Avinger.
The metal poles which supported the tabernacle are still there rusting. But nothing else is left. The religious crowds no longer come to this quiet countryside. The fire came in 2011, however.
The Bear Creek Fire of 2011 blazed across the isolated cemetery with its tabernacle, taking out a rather unique grave shed there, too. The fire singed grave stones, burned memory items and flowers, but now that 14 years have passed, it is hard to tell anything unusual happened here.
Still, a tabernacle and grave shed were important in previous years. The grave shed idea can be traced to Native Americans who would cover grave mounds with low structures to protect the site from weathering.
Some of the pioneer names in the old Bear Creek graveyard are Clark, Felker, Lane and Stewart. But otherwise it is a cemetery with no close generations living nearby, and no one to keep it up, much less improve it, one area resident said.
“And this particular cemetery is rather deep in the woods,” the resident said.
And now, Bear Creek has a new cemetery some distance away and a Bear Creek Church Baptist congregation which is still holding services.
Some of the family names here in the newer and well-kept cemetery are Clark, Dodson, Duncan, Glover, Hedge, Hodge, Neese, Summerlin and Watson.
It is the tabernacle in the old cemetery which is gone. The fire took it. For some reason, even though the tabernacle is missing, the sounds of people coming to it in these woods for a family service or a revival in the woods still seem to be present. Cass County’s last tabernacle still lives in a way.
Editor’s Note: Next Week, Citizens Journal-Sun will tell more of the Bear Creek Fire of 2011.
Here is how the Bear Creek Cemetery Tabernacle looks today. Only metal poles are left for the building and fencing.