FAIRHOPE — While Eleanor Harpe hasn’t been around as long as her church has, her roots go deep at at Twin Beech African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. She is ready to help celebrate its 140th birthday tomorrow and will follow it with one of her own just seven days later.

Twin Beech A.M.E. Zion had been in existence for 54 years when Harpe was born Sept. 30, 1921, and much had been accomplished in the life of the church, now located at 6664 Twin Beech Road, south of Fairhope.

In fact, when the church began with brush arbor meetings in 1867, there wasn’t a Fairhope. The area where the town would begin to spring up in 1894 was then called Stapleton Pasture or Alabama City.

According to the church’s collected history, Rev. Charles Lee was pastor of the group of Christians that met in the arbor and called their assembly Zion Chapel. The group built a frame structure near the arbor between two beech trees whose branches intertwined. The congregation continued to worship at this site and increase in members, rebuilding or adding on to their wooden church two or three times. They organized their first children’s choir while at this site and purchased their first organ. Harpe was christened there when she was about 1 month old.

Eventually, the congregation decided to rebuild at a “more desirable and centrally located site, under the pastorate of the late Rev. A.N. Bennett.” That site was further east down the road on top of a bluff. Harpe was 5 when the concrete block building was completed and dedicated in 1925. The men of the congregation dug out the church’s basement using mules and made the concrete blocks for the church. Axel Johnson, a local craftsman, directed the project. Zion Chapel was renamed Twin Beech A.M.E. Zion Church in honor of the beech trees at the old site.

Harpe, who was born at her parents’ residence on South Mobile Street, says she was brought to church by her mother, Olivetta Powers, along with her older brother, Orlando, who died in 1994. She added that her father, Ed, didn’t attend with them because of the hours he spent making money to take care of them.

Harpe became a Christian when she was 12.

“The pastor was preaching about the Last Supper; I wanted to eat at that table,” she said, adding that God spoke to her that day, and as a result, she was baptized and became a member. In 1945, she got married at the church.

Harpe has fond memories of annual summer picnics the church held at Bailey’s Creek when she was a child. “Later,” she said, “We began going down to the Gulf instead.”

She also recalled an annual winter event that drew many guests to their church. The choir, which numbered about 20, would give a concert and sing a cappella the old Negro spirituals, tunes such as “Steal Away,” “Wade in the Water,” “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” and “His Eye is on the Sparrow.”

“The church would be packed,” she said. “Those folks from the North couldn’t believe we could sing without direction or a starting pitch.” The concerts ended sometime in the 1960s.

Harpe, although one of the church’s oldest members, remains actively involved to this day. Currently she teaches adult church school. She said she has also served as church secretary-treasurer and class leader. As a child, she sang in the children’s choir, and for 40 years served as the accompanist for both the children and adult choirs, an area of service her mother had also performed.

In addition to church service, Harpe had a 38-year career as a teacher. She began teaching in 1939 at the Vaughn School in Stockton, moving on to the Anna T. Jeanes School, Baldwin County Training School and closed out her career as a guidance counselor at Fairhope High School, retiring in 1977, she said.

Harpe is also an artist. She likes to paint using oils or acrylics. A pencil sketch she drew from an old photograph of the last frame building hangs in the church vestibule. She thinks it is the building where she was christened. Last spring, some of her paintings and wood carvings (yes, she does that, too) were displayed in downtown Fairhope in the French Quarter.

Over the last 35-40 years, many additions and improvements have been made to the church building and property. In 1988, the church was added to the National Register of Historic Places for its architecture, described as medieval and Romanesque.

Church members Thelma Todd and Sylvia Bonner provided most of the historical background for this article. They continue to gather historical information about the church and members of the congregation. Anyone with relevant information or materials should contact them by calling the church, 928-7735, or by e-mail at: thelmajtodd@bellsouth.net or seb853@aol.com.

Anniversary Celebration

Rev. Michael G. Davis, pastor of Twin Beech A.M.E. Zion Church invites the public to attend their 140th anniversary celebration.

Dr. Cain Hope Felder will be the guest speaker at the worship service, which begins at 11 a.m.

Felder is is professor of New Testament Language and Literature and editor of The Journal of Religious Thought at the School of Divinity, Howard University.

Felder is the author of several books. His first, Troubling Biblical Waters: Race, Class and Family, gained immediate recognition as a “groundbreaking study.”

He taught at Princeton Theological Seminary and was the first national director of the United Methodist Black Caucus. Felder is also founder of the Biblical Institute for Social Change, Washington, D.C., an organization dedicated to inform, inspire, affirm and transform the Christian community through scholarship and research.

A churchwide dinner will follow the service.