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

DATE: FRIDAY, March 10, 1995                   TAG: 9503100028
SECTION: EXTRA                    PAGE: 6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PAUL DELLINGER
DATELINE: TAZEWELL                                LENGTH: Medium

EXHIBIT SHOWCASES RELIGIOUS HERITAGE

An exhibit on Southwest Virginia's religious heritage, including a pulpit from which Robert E. Lee once spoke, will continue through June 1 at Historic Crab Orchard Museum.

It includes nearly 100 items loaned by churches and families as well as items already owned by the museum.

The Robert E. Lee Pulpit was used by Gen. Lee during his tenure as president of Washington College at Lexington. In 1910, it was donated to Saint Mary's Episcopal Church in Bluefield and has been used there ever since.

A communion table dating back to about 1900 and a 1924 copper steeple, both of which survived the 1959 fire that destroyed the old Tazewell Presbyterian Church, are among the items. Others include communion silver from the former Cove Presbyterian Church dating back to 1833, a set given by a coal company official in 1887 to Christ Episcopal Church in Pocahontas in memory of miners killed in an explosion three years earlier, and a set donated by a Philadelphia Episcopal church to Trinity Chapel at Richlands as investors began laying out what they hoped would become the ``Pittsburgh of the South.''

Family items include an original ``fraktur,'' an ornamented 1785 Lutheran baptismal certificate, in German, of a member of the Spangler family of Burkes Garden, antique babies' baptismal spoons, and illustrated Sunday school lesson cards from the 1890s. The session minutes of the Burkes Garden Presbyterian Church from 1830 until it closed in 1980 are on display, as is a history of Burkes Garden Lutheran Church by Ida Greever.

There is a 1765 German Bible, an 1844 Scots-Irish Presbyterian Bible, and others along with 19th-century hymnals and the 1835 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer given to Neville Craig Beckley when he became the first Methodist Episcopal Bishop of West Virginia.

Also being shown is the 1892 pump organ which served the former Tazewell Lutheran Church. The museum plans a permanent display of the region's religious heritage when a new gallery wing is added in the next three to four years.

by CNB