Church's tale reaches back to misty trail of history at Tranquil Cemetery
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By TOM WILKINSON
Special to the Journal
Ed's note: Descended of pioneer settlers, Richland College Professor Emeritus Tom Wilkinson left Mt. Vernon, earning masters level degrees in three disciplines. His career in academia includes tenures at Southern Methodist, the University of Texas, Dallas County Community College, and upon his return to East Texas, Northeast Texas Community College. Now retired, Mr. Wilkinson lives in Mt. Vernon where he writes and works as a community volunteer.
A 1921 news clipping linking Tranquil Cemetery and West New Hope Church indicates that the church's history reaches beyond the 117th anniversary celebrated last month.
Tranquil Cemetery sits on the side of a hill sloping north toward a tributary of Ripley Creek, which runs north and south, just east of the bottom. The cemetery itself is stark - except for one lone crepe myrtle, no trees or shrubs grow within its boundaries. Yet that very starkness is set off against a regionally unparalleled vista of rolling pasture land that stretches both east and west to the horizon. To the west and up the hill are feeding troughs and a barn and I'll never forget one glorious winter afternoon when, as the sun set, I literally watched the cows come home, trailing each other one by one in a stately procession as they ascended the hill across the road. Whoever named Tranquil must have experienced the same sense of peacefulness.
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I first discovered Tranquil Cemetery, and later West New Hope Church, back in the 1980's after returning to East Texas and starting some research on Franklin County cemeteries, along with a bit of ancestor hunting. Actually, Tranquil sits just across the Franklin - Titus County line, about two miles north of Winfield, so it never got included in the articles I did for Mt. Vernon's Optic Herald.
But the cemetery's connection with my mother's family, the Killingsworths, and their cousins, the Hogues, brought me back again and again. It wasn't just the family interest, though - it was the simple magic of the place itself.
Without knowing its history, you sense there must have been a church here. Just south of the cemetery arbor is a plot of flat ground where I imagine stood the church described by Cornelia Ann Stewart Smith in a November 11, 1921 story from the Titus Times Review.
She was the oldest daughter of early Texan Captain Charles S. Stewart and Martha Cocke Stewart. Captain Stewart is remembered in local lore as one of the settlers joining in a military campaign to drive the Indians from East Texas following the Ripley Massacre.
The Ripley family settled near the creek in the Republic of Texas (1836-1845) days. A daughter who survived an Indian raid on the farm gave a harrowing account of her flight.
The account of the raid, in which nine members of the Ripley family died, is told on a historical marker 3.5 miles east of Mt. Vernon on U.S. 67 (north side of highway.)
The story of the United States sending military aid to Texas is referenced in Ambrose Ripley's application to the Texas government for reimbursement for corn provided for troops.
Mrs. Stewart-Smith said the church at Tranquil Cemetery was a 16-foot square building built of logs with the top covered by riven boards that were finished with pegs. That was in 1843.
The newspaper clipping was found in the family papers of the late Virgie Beth Hughes, whose family's oral history puts the date of the first church at Tranquil as early as 1841.
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Those were the days when immigrants from the southern and border states like Tennessee and Kentucky came from Fort Towson and settlements along the Red River down the Cherokee Trace, an ancient trading route. No doubt the Cherokee entered East Texas along this route, after being driven from the eastern states in the 19th century. The Cherokee are credited with planting roses that still flourish along segments of the trail. Actually, this was an earlier Caddo route connecting villages along the rivers of East Texas and into Oklahoma.
Mrs. Stewart Smith said that her father, Captain Stewart, and neighbors from Mississippi founded the Tranquil Church as the first ever built in Titus County. It was so isolated at the time, she said, that since no white preacher was to be found, a slave of Mrs. John Stewart was invited to preach the first sermon.
Preceding the establishment of the cemetery, early burials may well have taken place on the Ripley family farm.
In any event, the first marked burial at Tranquil was that of Elizabeth Aikin Speer, wife of Issac Spear, a third generation Texan buried in 1866.
A new, enlarged church was built in 1877. It was this structure that was moved in 1880's to the new location that became West New Hope Methodist Episcopal church, named for the community it now adjoins.
This church is east and north of Winfield, reached most logistically by turning from U.S. 67 east of Mt. Vernon onto FM 1734 North. Take NW 13 (an oil top) to the left and bear left again at its juncture with NW 18.
The more poetic route is to travel to the church from the cemetery, to pause and wonder what combination of men, draft animals and mechanical ingenuity was required to move the church across the great wash at the foot of the hill, then up the long slope of land rising away.
To take this route, turn north from U.S. 67 just west of Winfield on CR 2180 (an oil top.) It winds into the bottom, across a bridge that flooded then and floods still, up the hill and to the cemetery sitting on a rise.
Continuing north from the cemetery, turn right on NW 18. The land falls away in a gentle slope, and beyond farms dotting the land, far off in the distance West New Hope sits against the backdrop of a storybook forest.
West New Hope observed its Centennial celebration in 1986 with the installation of a Texas Historical Medallion. Tranquil Cemetery received this status just last year.
The white frame church that stands today replaced the structure moved there from Tranquil in the previous century.
At least two theories for the move have been suggested: a population shift toward the north and east, and / or a continual flooding problem in the Ripley Creek tributary bottom that prevented folks on the north side getting to church on Sundays and to the eagerly anticipated "camp meetings" that were the social as well as spiritual events of their day.
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My great grand parents - Edmond Jones and Eliza Minerva Webb Killingsworth, bought land at West New Hope in the 1880's and gave an acre and a half to the church for its new site.
The new church, built in 1903, cost $204..50. Records show that $215.50 was collected, - the sum broken down by donor on a receipt found in the Hughes papers. It is this church, essentially unchanged, that exists today. It's a modest, white frame rectilinear building facing east - essentially one room, except for the modifications just inside the front that provide a vestibule, a restroom and storage area. The interior of the sanctuary remains pretty much as it was after restoration in the 1990's removed some of the "improvements" of intervening years.
Services are held at 9:30 a.m. each Sunday.
Some would say the past is past, but within the walls of this building, the past lives. Some members of the diminishing, but devoted congregation are descended of the earliest family names associated with the Texas frontier.
Their story echoes back through a vapor of history not fully known, but as real as the tombstones at Tranquil Cemetery.
Because of the work of Charles Black, a Texas Historical Marker was placed at the cemetery last May.
"We Southerners are accused of living in the past," B.F. Hicks said, addressing those gathered. "What else can we do? The past lives in us and with us."
As long as churches like West New Hope endure, it always will.