16. Contemplate death (and life) at Ebenezer Cemetery.

After lying down on the grass to reflect, find the oldest grave in the cemetery. Peter January, a Revolutionary War veteran (one of four buried here; the others are Robert Black, Ephraim January, and Walter Cunningham) and grandson of a French Protestant immigrant, died in 1789. That’s when Ebenezer Church, believed to be the very first congregation in Jessamine County, still met in a log meetinghouse. Kentucky was not yet a state, and encounters with indigenous people still occurred. The stone church house (abandoned in 1883 and restored in 1953) you see was originally built in 1803.

 

Fittingly for a stone church, “Ebenezer” means “stone of help.” In the Old Testament, the Israelites lost the Ark of the Covenant to the Philistines at Ebenezer and then regained the Ark in a battle at the same site. They erected a stone to memorialize this victory and called it “Ebenezer—Stone of Help.”

 

Memory of the first pastor at Ebenezer, Adam Rankin, has not aged well. First, Rankin, described as a “strange, eccentric man, a dreamer of dreams, a Kentucky Luther,” went on a fanatical campaign against some beloved music. Believing that the biblical Psalter should be the only songbook for the Church, he hated that Isaac Watts’s hymns (including “Joy to the World”) altered the biblical text. He was so angry that in 1789 he traveled on horseback (for 12 days—each way!) from his rural Ebenezer parish in Kentucky to the first General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia to speak against it. He exhorted the assembly to “refuse to allow the great and pernicious error of adoption of the use of Watt's hymns in public worship.” He got sent home without much satisfaction, after which began to “denounce the Presbyterian clergy as Deists, blasphemers, and rejecters of revelation.” He even excluded from the Lord’s Table “all admirers of Watts’s Psalms,” who he castigated as rivals of the Word of God.

 

Second, Rankin was an enslaver. He owned Lewis Hayden, who eventually escaped and became an abolitionist in Boston. In his memoir The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Hayden wrote, “I belonged to Reverend Adam Rankin, a Presbyterian minister in Lexington Kentucky.” Hayden continued, “When he was going to leave Kentucky for Pennsylvania, he sold all my brothers and sisters at auction. I stood by and saw them sold. When I was just going up on the block, he swapped me off for a pair of carriage horses. ... It was commonly reported that my master had said in the pulpit that there was no more harm in separating a family of slaves than a litter of pigs.”

 

His deep conservatism came into sharp relief in 1803. That year marked an important transition at Ebenezer. Robert Bishop succeeded Rankin. They became bitter rivals. It was, as one history of the church narrates, “Rankin, the son of Scottish immigrants, a slave-owner educated in rough-hewn schools on the American frontier, versus the young upstart Bishop, twenty-two years Rankin's junior, an early abolitionist educated at the prestigious University of Edinburgh in Scotland.” By the 1810s Bishop had organized several “Negro” schools, including one at Transylvania in Lexington. The two men fought for seventeen years, and it delayed Bishop’s ordination. When the case was finally heard by the Presbytery Commission, both parties paid the price. Bishop was publicly rebuked. Rankin was suspended from the ministry.

 

The church, diminishing in numbers, stopped meeting around 1870. It was absorbed into Troy Presbyterian Church, although about twenty members kept on meeting in the old building into the twentieth century. The building remained in use for burials. In 1890, for example, Hugh Guyn, a prominent 45-year-old farmer who was worried that he was suffering from an impaired mind and might be taken to an insane asylum, went to his barn early on a Tuesday morning, got a stout rope, made a loop-hold at one end, threw the other over a beam, climbed on a dry good box, place the rope around his neck, and jumped. His remains were interred in the Ebenezer graveyard.

 

The building itself collapsed in the early 1920s and was nearly overwhelmed by a tobacco patch. The Ebenezer Cemetery Association, formed to preserve it, beautifully restored it in 1953. The building is still used, though just once a year. The annual picnic is held the second Sunday in September, rain or shine. Many descendants attend, and a local Presbyterian minister usually speaks.

 

In 1930s the planning committee displayed old artifacts. They included old Bibles, china mugs, tuning forks, and “communion tokens” (pieces of lead formed from soapstone molds that functioned as a kind of ticket given to members who had passed their spiritual examination before the elders on the Saturday afternoon before a communion Sunday). In 1940 a choir of 40 voices sang the “old psalms.” In 1958 an Easter sunrise service was held. In 1978 all attendees brought food for a “basket lunch.” In 1992 Ebenezer was the subject of a scene in an outdoor drama called “Jessamine: 1774-1992.” The scene depicted a business meeting, called by Adam Rankin, in which congregants debated paying a preacher the scandalous sum of $5 per Sunday and the singing of the “modern” hymn “Amazing Grace.” In 1998 historical re-enactors wore authentic dress and weapons in the graveyard. In 2009 vandals wreaked havoc in the cemetery, topping over a dozen tombstones.

 

All in all, the annual picnic, not to mention church life itself, nicely encapsulates the full range of dynamics—the love and violence and conflict and togetherness and sustenance and transcendence—inherent in human relationships.

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