For most of the past 122 years, the sound of a church bell could be heard in the rolling hills of Fletcher, but after Oak Grove Baptist Church holds its final service at 10:45 a.m. Sunday, Nov. 28, the bell will be silenced.
“That bell was something else,” said Michael Nickelson, who grew up both in the church and in Fletcher. “If you lived in Fletcher and you heard the bell ring any time other than Sunday morning, you knew you had to get to the church because there was some kind of emergency.”
Oak Grove has been part of Fletcher since 1899, when a minister whose name has been lost to history rode into the small community on Hwy. H west of De Soto and started the church. At the time, there was only a small store, a post office and a one-room schoolhouse.
“The (Pine Ford general) store closed in the early 1990s, and pretty much what’s left of Fletcher is the post office and the church. And now the church is closing,” said Nickelson, 52, of Festus.
Once the center of a community
That unnamed minister and eight people met to worship in the old schoolhouse until the Oak Grove Baptist Church was built at 7622 Hwy. H sometime around 1912, according to a two-page, typewritten history of the church.
And people continued to congregate at Oak Grove – through two world wars, the Great Depression and most recently through COVID-19.
Nickelson said his family lived in a house on Nickelson Road near the church since the late 1800s.
“My whole family went there,” he said. “My grandmother started my family going there, in the late 1930s or early 1940s. My dad was one of seven kids. They all went there. I was one of seven kids. We all went there. That church was kind of the foundation of that little community.”
Nickelson said a gentleman named Howard Washburn, who was deaf and mute, once lived on his parents’ property.
“His job was to ring the bell. He would get so excited every Sunday morning. It was his thing. It was so important to him to have that job,” Nickelson said. “Later, it became my job. I rang the bell at my grandmother’s funeral, and I rang the bell at my father’s funeral. That bell has echoed throughout the hills of Fletcher for many years.”
Another longtime Oak Grove member, Doris Courtois of De Soto, traces her involvement with the church to her grandfather, Chester Turner, a minister who in the written history was credited with moving the church forward in the post-World War II years.
“I was born and raised in Fletcher,” she said. “I spent my childhood there in the 1960s and grew up in that church. My grandfather rode on horseback. I was very young when he was the preacher, so I don’t remember a lot about him. But my family attended church there. My mom and dad got married there in 1935.”
Courtois, 68, said Oak Grove was the center of Fletcher’s social life.
“We lived on top of the hill. We’d go to church on Sunday mornings, of course, but on Sunday evenings as well as Wednesday evenings,” she said. “Our church was our community. I’d love homecomings, where people would come from all around and we’d set out tables outside and there would be singing and eating.”
Courtois said she would often be called up to sing at services.
Nickelson had similar memories of community.
“One time the creek flooded so bad it got into the basement and one of the walls collapsed. The whole community came together – even people who didn’t go to the church – to help fix it and clean it up,” he said.
“When I was young, the church didn’t have any indoor bathrooms. They had outhouses into the 1970s. When they put in indoor bathrooms, what a big deal that was. But it was a community atmosphere. Everybody knew everybody else’s business. Sunday morning was when you got caught up with what was happening with everyone else. It’s a shame what’s happened.”
Time has caught up
What’s happened is that times have changed, said Nancy (Kramer) Urness, 75, who still lives in Fletcher and has attended Oak Grove since she was 6 or 7. She serves as the assistant treasurer-secretary, but cautioned that the title is misleading.
“We’re down to only three or four folks who do everything,” she said. “We all do a multiple number of jobs. When somebody’s not able to do something, one of the rest of us can fill in.”
Sunday morning attendance, Urness said, averages five to seven people – and a live service is now held only one week a month.
“We’re closing because we’re down to just a few members, and most of us are in our 60s or 70s or older,” she said. “We just can’t keep it going anymore financially.”
Urness said Oak Grove survived for years from a sizable donation from a couple of longtime members, but that’s almost gone.
“It’s been very sad. We kept going longer than anyone could have expected,” she said. “About five or six years ago, we had rotating preachers. But for a while, we’ve been down to just one – Brian Bennett, who has been coming up from Potosi on the fourth Sundays. He won’t take any money from us, but he preaches the same as if there is 200 people in the building rather than two or five.”
Bennett will give the final sermon on Nov. 28, and Nickelson has been enlisted to sing.
Urness said a lot of factors have contributed to the end of Oak Grove.
“When the children of our dedicated members moved away, they were replaced by new families, but they ended up going to churches in De Soto or to Pilgrims Rest (in Ware), which had more activities for children. You can’t blame them for that,” she said.
Urness figures that beginning on that first Sunday in December, what’s left of the membership of Oak Grove may congregate in each others’ homes for Bible study or to listen to audio CDs of past services held at the First Baptist Church of De Soto.
“I don’t know what will happen to the building,” she said. “The deed will go to the Jefferson Baptist Association. They’ll decide what to do with it.”
Urness said the final, farewell service on Nov. 28 likely will be an emotional one.
“I imagine there will be a lot of Kleenex available,” she said. “It’s going to be very sad, but the memories will still linger. A church is both the place where people meet and a place not specifically limited to a building. The memories may linger in this building, but a church is in everyone’s heart.”