OLD CHURCH IS MORE THAN A MEMORY

                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, January 18, 1992                   TAG: 9201180106
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: A-3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: By MARY BISHOP STAFF WRITER
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium
OLD CHURCH IS MORE THAN A MEMORY
The simple wooden church of Harry Smith Jr.'s youth was torn down years ago.
It was the church where choirs and great preachers thrilled his young ears. It was where in the summers, families thronged to revivals and prayer meetings and church suppers.
Most of his life, Smith, 74, has lived right across the street from it. He couldn't stand for the old First Baptist Church of Hollins to be forgotten.
So from its demolition in the 1970s, he gathered wood from interior walls. He assembled tin roofing and painted it just the right shade of red. He cut colored cellophane to stand for the old stained-glass windows. He formed tiny wooden pews for the sanctuary.
And in his front yard in the Oldfields community adjacent to Hollins College, he created his church all over again. Four feet tall this time.
Smith sat back and waited for the weather to do the rest. The paint is peeling now. The red paint is wearing off the roof.
"I like it this way," he said, "because that was the way it was, weather-beated."
Oldfields - or Oldfield, to many people in that community - was settled in the 19th century by servants of the college and its female students. In those days, students brought female servants with them. Many of them stayed on at Hollins, married local men and raised their families in the modest community across the fields from campus.
Ethel Smith, a Virginia Tech English teacher who's writing a book about the community, said "Oldfield" is a common name given to slave quarters of that period.
Now Oldfields is changing. Government grants finally brought water to the homes in the late 1980s. Old-timers are dying off. Younger families are moving in.
First Baptist built the first part of a new brick church in the 1960s. The old one, built in 1905 and askew since lightning rocked it years ago, stood right behind it, right where the church eventually built an addition. That's why the old building was destroyed.
But part of it lives on across the street in Smith's yard and in his memory.
"I knew our community was being changed all around," he said. "I wanted us to have a remembrance." It took him about three months to build it.
He gave his reproduction the old chimney he remembered, the same vestibule where he used to hang his coat, the same bell tower and the same spot in the back for the pastor's study.
Smith's little church draws people year-round, especially when he adorns it with lights at Christmas. Hollins students ride their horses down a bridle path into Oldfields. They've gotten to know Smith and the story of his community. Some of their teachers have brought them there.
Smith's mother and father worked at the college. Smith retired as a Norfolk and Western Railway laborer a decade ago, but still works 4 to 8 a.m. at an Arby's restaurant on Williamson Road.
He said he is the third-oldest man left in Oldfields.
He is delighted to talk about the old days there.
The license plate on his Plymouth Sundance reads "OL-FIELD."

by Archana Subramaniam by CNB