Remembering The Wheatland Methodist Church
by Charles Mays

When the Wheatland Methodist Church was 100 years old, and I was a young boy, I attended the commemoration with my family. It was a special Sunday, that I remembered, along with most of the others from my youth, while living with my grandmother at the Nance Farm.

We went to church every Sunday, not just at Easter and Christmas and Mother's Day. My aunt, Evelyn Nance, had the responsibility of guiding her twin boys and all of the other community children down the "straight and narrow" in the Sunday School class attended by children bearing family names that are still known and respected around the old Wheatland community.

We met just off the sanctuary in a small room that always had either the beginnings of a quilt, or a nearly completed one, stretched over a frame drawn above us at the ceiling. The quilt, waiting for more fine stitchings and the accompanying gentle conversation of the ladies of the church, often incorporated a pattern provided by the "Home Demonstration Club", which was a ladies' society that met regularly in various homes. We kids knew all about this since it was a time before the popularity of baby sitters or "child care specialists". In those days, children were taken to adult gatherings, with admonitions to be on their best behavior, with sure-to-be-kept promises of a good "licking" in the event of any deviation from that best behavior.