Thelma Lou Campbell, a dog belonging to Gordon Cotton, rests on the cool pavement leading to Jordan’s Chapel Methodist Episcopal Church, South.(The Vicksburg Post/MELANIE DUNCAN)

[03/31/02] A promise and a love of history led to the resurrection of Jordan’s Chapel on a hillside near Campbell Swamp.

“I had collected all these materials for years,” said Hobbs Freeman, an artist, who with friends, built the barn-red church that now overlooks his art studio and home in south Warren County.

But it was the setting of a March 23 date for a friend’s wedding that provided the oomph needed to get busy.

He promised a young girl years ago that she could get married on his land.

Six months ago, she held him to it.

“She said, I’ve got the boy, the ring and the date,'” said Gordon Cotton, Freeman’s neighbor who shared in the construction efforts.

With a looming deadline, the two began building with salvaged materials they had collected over the years.

What resulted was an amalgamation of history and hard work christened Jordan’s Chapel, Methodist Episcopal Church, South, in a consecration service this month.

After selecting a site on a slope a few hundred yards from Freeman’s studio, the two gathered a group to place old railroad timbers for the chapel’s foundation. “It took eight men to move one of them,” Cotton said, of the beams Freeman bought 15 years ago when the Little J railroad line closed. They were placed at 4-foot intervals, dictating the size of the church a mere 14 feet by 36 feet.

“It’s a miniature, a petite basilica,” Freeman calls it. It seats only 24 plus Cotton’s calico cat that often wanders in during services.

“It’s the most exquisite little building I’ve ever seen,” said Ginger Rosser, a friend and local designer who joined the building effort. She white-washed the pews, originally from Antioch Baptist Church, as well as helped upholster the kneelers.

“I’ve been friends with both of them for years,” she said of Freeman and Cotton. “I saw how stressed they were in getting things ready for the wedding that I decided to pitch in.”

Freeman repaired seven stained-glass windows (each dedicated to family members and friends) to line the chapel’s walls, made from doors donated by friend and neighbor Walter May.

“As churches in Jefferson County would be renovated, I would buy the old ones,” Freeman said. “This was 25 years ago, before I thought of a chapel. I hated to see them thrown away.”

The chapel’s entrance features two, 10-foot cypress doors that once hung at the side entrance of St. Francis Xavier Academy’s auditorium and date from 1885. They were retrieved from a dump pile and rotten parts replaced.

Walnut from the Old Warren County Court has been fitted into the nave and the railing on the balcony and stairs was once the altar of St. Mary of the Pines Catholic Church.

At the altar, Freeman’s family Bible rests on a carved, wooden pulpit from 1867 that originally stood in the Sacred Heart Catholic Church in Rodney. The now-tattered Bible once belonged to the son of Freeman’s great-great-great-grandmother, Emma Kline Freeman, to whom the church is dedicated.

She had a chapel built on her land in Tensas Parish in 1857 the first Jordan’s Chapel.

The new chapel isn’t a replica. “No one knows what it looked like,” Cotton said, nor exactly why it was named Jordan (pronounced jer-den). He surmises it was named after the Jordan River, where Christ was baptized. “It is symbolic for the end of this life and the beginning of the next one,” Cotton said.

But in the new Jordan’s Chapel, what isn’t old is hand-crafted.

The walnut flooring came from trees cut from Cotton’s property and planed with the help of friend Steve Brown. Freeman sculpted the free-turning copper cross that rises from chapel’s roof and formed the sconces that illuminate the church’s humble interior.

“Gordon’s love of history and Hobbs’ ability to craft and mold and make and design things like he does, it was natural for them to develop that,” said Charles Riles, longtime friend.

“That’s the beauty of it. When you go there, it’s in the midst of nature, it’s simplicity, yet it’s elegant, it’s almost a contradiction in words you find beauty in the woods and everything has a meaning that they share with other people.”

Brass plaques are mounted to explain the significance of the chapel’s elements.

But sharing history is important to both Freeman and Cotton.

As director of the Old Court House Museum and the author of numerous books on Vicksburg history, Cotton routinely demonstrates his love of preserving the past.

For Freeman, history is a family tradition.

“It was instilled in me,” he said, as he recalled stories his grandmothers would tell him of places and homes intertwined with his family’s past. “My ancestors (in this area) go back to the Spanish territorial days. It’s hard not to have an appreciation of the past.”

Freeman drew on his heritage when it came to establishing the chapel’s denomination.

Freeman grew up in Fayette and in the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, an earlier branch of the Methodist Church that was almost decimated during the Civil War.

So when the chapel was officially blessed on March 2, Jordan’s Chapel was declared a part of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. It may be the only one in the country.

In creating the chapel, Freeman also resurrected a bygone tradition.

All religious services are private, as once was the tradition of property owners.

“That’s really an era that’s been forgotten to go to your own chapel,” Riles said. “It’s unique that a person wants to put a chapel on their property but this one is the right touches on the right piece of land with the right people.”

The chapel will be open for a rare public tour next Sunday as part of an Old Court House Museum benefit.

“So many people have wanted to see it, and Hobbs is very active in the Historical Society,” Cotton said.

The tour will include Freeman’s studio/home and Cotton’s house both with stories of their own.

Cotton’s house, built by relatives in 1840, is known for its collection of antiques. Freeman’s studio, built by friends 15 years ago, is packed with his collection of artifacts and sculptures.

But the chapel bridges the two, set off from the winding dirt road that connects their properties, as it brings together the past and present; this world and beyond.

“They’ve achieved something unique,” said Riles, who attended a recent service, “because it does have the feeling you are in a special place a place of worship.”