“We walked in the shadow of the Trace

To find a holy place.

Keep it thus.

Larry and Sandy, Powell River, BC”

— Note in the guestbook at Rocky Springs United Methodist Church, Nov. 17, 2009.

ROCKY SPRINGS — It’s the last homecoming.

The annual spring event at Rocky Springs United Methodist Church next Sunday will be bittersweet this year. It’s being billed as “a celebration of life,” a life that will come to an end when the 200-year-old church closes its doors for good on June 30.

If you go

Rocky Springs United Methodist Church will celebrate its final homecoming at 11 a.m. next Sunday, April 18.

The church is off the Natchez Trace Parkway and can also be reached by traveling on Old Port Gibson Road about three miles south of its intersection with Fisher Ferry Road in Claiborne County.

Visitors are asked to bring a covered dish to share and lawn chairs for all members of their party.

Music will be provided by the Rocky Springs Band.

For more information, call Elizabeth Piazza at 601-924-0659.

The congregation, sometimes numbering three in recent years, has decided it can no longer maintain the church, its adjacent cemetery and grounds and the ongoing life of a church family.

“It was a hard decision to make,” said minister Elizabeth Piazza, who makes the drive from her home in Clinton each week for the 8:45 a.m. service. “Our regular attenders have gotten old, and it’s just become more and more difficult for them to take care of the property. We’re hoping to find an organization to take over the church so it can remain a church.”

The church at Rocky Springs grew up around a natural stopping point on the old Natchez Trace, the trail once used by Native Americans as well as later European traders and explorers. The natural spring for which the town was named was a reliable watering spot in the late 1700s.

Now, as then, travelers along the Trace make planned stops at the Rocky Springs church, the only building that remains from what was once a prosperous town.

“People from all over the world sign our book,” said longtime church member Jane Regan, 80, whose husband Jesse, 83, was born in nearby Hankinson. The Regans have worshiped there for decades. “It’s just a place where most people say they feel something they don’t normally feel. It’s a sacred, hallowed place.”

Wednesday, Canadian snowbirds on their way home to Quebec were among a dozen or so who stopped at the church. Gabby Potvin and Jean Paul Tremblay have stopped there every spring since 1997, Tremblay said.

Newton, Miss., residents Jimmy and Carol Blackburn also made a repeat visit.

Carol likes to stop in and play hymns on the piano. “We come every spring to see the dogwoods, and to play, because it sounds so good in here,” she said after opening to “Church in the Wildwood” in the old hymnbook. The Blackburns have visited the Rocky Springs church 10 or 12 times over the years, they said.

“Our doors are always open,” is an unofficial motto of the Rocky Springs United Methodist Church, and about 50 visitors step across its old threshold every week, Piazza said. They sit for a while in the quiet sanctuary, sign the guestbook and wander through the cemetery where the graves date to the 1830s.

Many, like the Blackburns, are Mississippi folk, but the guestbook also reveals notes from visitors from North Bend, Ore., Peterborough, Ont., Aupeir, France, and Rome, Italy. “Here I stand in this holy place,” one reads. “Go with peace.”

“It’s the first thing I look at every Sunday when I get here,” Piazza said. “I love to check our messages — kind of like e-mail. This is what we are striving to keep alive because this is our ministry.”

Before the church was built in 1837, a log cabin might have stood on the same site. A Methodist circuit preacher stopped in Rocky Springs once or twice a month to minister to the small community of farmers that settled near the spring.

“He carried in his bearskin saddlebags a Bible, a prayer book which he called ‘the Discipline,’ a volume of John Wesley’s sermons and little else,” wrote historian Dawson A. Phelps for a Natchez Trace Parkway research project. One, Tobias Gibson, is thought to have preached at or near Rocky Springs in 1799, he writes, and a settled Methodist congregation “had come into being” there by 1806.

The town grew to include 2,616 residents by 1860, a number that included 54 planters and more than 2,000 slaves.

The church survived an outbreak of yellow fever in 1878, a boll weevil infestation that destroyed the farm economy of the town and the eventual death of the town itself, and the Regans and others willing to make the drive have continued to attend services and celebrate the annual homecoming for returning former church members and the extended church family — until now.

“It’s not a matter of money so much as we just don’t have the congregation to continue to support it as a full and active church,” Piazza said. Records list about 20 members on the rolls but usual attendance is “three or four.”

A couple of members have died this year, she said. Some have moved away, or changed churches and not withdrawn their membership, and no one has come along to replace them.

“There aren’t any people in the area that are not churched,” said Regan, who has been the congregation’s pianist for years. “If people drive in from Jackson or Vicksburg or Raymond, they do it for a while but then decide it’s just too much.”

She does not know where she and her husband will go to worship when Rocky Springs closes.

Piazza said despite the sadness, she has faith God is at work and their prayers are being answered — even if it’s in ways they don’t understand.

“It’s like I have been telling the congregation as we go through this grieving process,” Piazza said. “There’s a beginning and there’s an end to everything. This may be the end of this place as a United Methodist Church, but it’s a beginning, too. Someone else will come along to carry the torch.”

Contact Pamela Hitchins at phitchins@vicksburgpost.com