Historic Paxton, her days and her ways, 1722-1913

I seem to have had a hand in most of the goings on in the church, you say? Well, I trust, I have done my part. We all had to help out in those days in ways that would seem queer now. For a long time we were too poor to hire a sexton, so some of the young men who lived near used to make the fires before service and we girls would have sweeping parties and clean up. Many a time have I swept the church in weather so cold I could hardly hold the broom. Later, we had an old colored man for sexton, named Emanuel Walker. He. was with us for years and was a quaint old character, quite famous all around this part of the country. Every Christmas he would drive to all our homes and call out "Chrismus gif , Chrismus gif " ! And he always got them, too. Our church picnics aren't the same as they were. They were the big event of the year ever since I was a small girl. We have had them more than sixty years regularly ; before that only occasionally. You know how they used to be a regular gathering of all the clans, and how all the descendants of old Parson Elder and you other Harrisburg people used to come out to them each summer. How we did work for those two big meals! Everyone sat down at long tables that just groaned with chicken and veal loaf, cakes, pies, pickles, cheese, hot rolls, huge cups of coffee and big tubs of lemonade under the trees. And Mrs. James Boyd always sent a big freezer of ice cream for the evening meal. And the games we played — Prisoner's Base, Lady Locket, Drop the Handkerchief, Bingo. And all the old songs we sang when evening was coming on — Juanita, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean, John Brown's Body, and Kathleen Mavourneen, And the dear old hymns of our fathers : Rock of Ages, Jesus Lover of My Soul, and Dennis ! Well, well, those days are over. Do you remember that young man who said Paxton picnic was the only place on earth where a man could stay away for twenty years and come back to find the same people doing the same things, singing the same songs and looking just the same, too? He couldn't say that now. We are growing up too fast. We cannot ask outsiders any more, and we have done away with the two meals, having just a stand-up lunch — sandwiches, coffee and lemonade. It's better so, perhaps. The old times are gone everywhere, just as the old hickories that used to fill this church grove are gone. But that does not say that the new oaks and mulberries planted in their place will not be strong and beautiful trees, nor that the new ways and days of Paxton will not be for the best good of our beloved church. Old Pewter Communion Service and Tokens. THE COMMUNION SERVICE OF EARLIER DAYS One of the changes that recent years has brought to old Paxton is in the communion service that from the time of Parson Elder, and before, down to 1892, was celebrated in a beautiful and peculiarly solemn manner. No one who has felt the uplift of the Sacramental Sundays of yore can ever forget it. It was with great reluctance many of the older generation saw the passing of the early forms.