Dean Poling: Visiting strangers with familiar names
Jul. 8—Architectural aesthetics played no part in his reasons for building a round church. Unless one considers keeping an eye on the devil a beautiful thing.
Legend claims he built a round church so the devil could find no corners to hide.
For more than 120 years, Albert's Chapel has remained vigilant against the devil as a small octagonal sentinel in the deep hills of Calhoun County, W.Va.
Albert Poling, one of my ancestors from the generations when being a Poling male in that region of West Virginia likely meant you were a farmer on weekdays but a Methodist preacher come Sunday, built the round chapel. Albert Poling's name still adorns the placard above the church door.
The church sits in the region where my father was born in the late 1930s but he was gone from there with my grandparents, aunts and uncle while he was still a toddler in the early 1940s; a place I visited once as a small child, until only again about 10 years ago as a man nearing the mid-century mark.
In the cemetery rise the headstones of numerous Polings who lived, worked, breathed, preached and fell years and decades ago.
Albert is buried here. Along with wife Artie.
So is Chess and Valarie Poling along with their son, Hess. Cleon and Grace Poling. Waitman and Erma Poling. A Brannon with the first name Poling. There's Wesley Poling and wife Clarsie Poling's stone marker carved to resemble a seven-foot tall tree trunk with a parchment bearing their names tied round its bark.
William and Belle Simmons Poling share a more traditional tombstone. As do Buna V. Poling and Ora Mae Poling. Worthy and Eula H. Poling's shared stone includes a metal sign denoting his service in Cuba during the Spanish-American War.
A family of strangers buried on ancestral grounds.
These are people whom I've never met. Many of whom I've never heard a word. Yet, I am bound to them by blood and earth, history and name. There is a connection deeper to these strangers than to some people whom I've known for years, but I am so far removed from the names on these markers by time and place, death and relocation, that it's almost impossible to connect the familial dots to determine just how I'm related to Worthy or Buna or Chess.
My father could explain the relations of some of the names but not all of them so even found, they remained tethered more by the same last name on a tombstone than by any genealogical definition of aunt or uncle, cousin or kin.
As a child seeing this place, the round church held some small interest. The biggest interest to me, as a boy, were the puddles filled with frogs as demonstrated by a distant cousin who pulled out handfuls simply by dipping his fingers into the water. During that visit, the old family farmhouse not only still stood but distant relatives lived there.
Then, my grandfather and grandmother were alive. As were my uncle and all of my cousins. Some of whom went on that trip but have since passed away during the intervening decades.
Through the years, I have always enjoyed hearing and reading stories of Albert's Chapel but had no desire in returning. Until more recent years, now that grandparents have passed, and parents have aged, and my children are growing older, and I am older than I was, no longer forever young, no longer forever anything with exception of the possibility of one day being forever a name on a stone somewhere.
Then, I wanted to see the round church and its yard of Polings past again. Felt a need to be there. So several summers ago, we went. A few summers later, my dad would be gone.
Strange how in youth, we have little time for the history of our pasts when there are so many older relatives who can still bring those names to life. Then, when we are the older relative, and the previous generations have gone, we seek the answers to those names from our pasts.
We want to know who they were and how they are connected to us, but who can say if the reason we want to know is because in some way we hope our family's future generations will take the time to wonder who we were when our time comes to be strangers with familiar names.
Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times and editor of The Tifton Gazette.
