The Brush Arbor, 1899
In the spring of 1899, a few families of this community began to meet for worship on Sunday afternoons under a brush arbor beside the spring that gives our church its name. A brush arbor is a roof of branches laid over a frame of poles, and benches of split logs beneath it. It kept off the sun, if not the rain. The spring ran out from under a stand of red cedars, as it still does, a little ways down the hill behind the church.

Those first members were freed people and their children. The oldest of them had been born in slavery; the youngest had been born free. They farmed, mostly on shares, on the land around us. They had little money and less time, and they built a church anyway. The founders, as written in the first roll book: Brother Percy Lyle, our first deacon, and his family; Brother Herman Bolen and family; Brother Theodore Porter and family; Sister Teresa North; Sister Ann Hice; and Brother Herbert Stills and family. Brother Lyle and Brother Porter cut the poles for the arbor.

The Reverend Willie Stuart, who rode a circuit of four country churches, preached under the arbor on the fourth Sunday of every month. On the other Sundays the members held Sunday school and prayer meeting themselves.

The First Church, 1904
In 1904 the members bought two acres on this hill, the ground we stand on today, for twenty-five dollars, raised a few cents at a time from eggs and chickens and extra cotton picking. With their own hands they built a one-room church of rough plank, with a wood stove, plain glass windows and a little belfry. Five years later they bought the bell, which we still ring. For many years the church was also the school for the children of the community, three months a year when the crops allowed, until the county built a school down the road.

The Years of Leaving
After the boll weevil came through these fields around the end of the First World War and the cotton failed, many of our families went north to look for work, to Detroit and Chicago and Cleveland, and later to Atlanta. Some years it seemed the church would empty out. But those who went north never let go of Cedar Spring. They sent money for the roof. They sent their children down to their grandparents in the summer. They came home in August. That is how homecoming started, long before anybody called it that, and it is why so many of you came so far this year.

The New Church, 1951
By 1950 the old building was leaning and the roof was beyond saving. Under the Reverend Lloyd Abron, the members voted to build. The men of the church did the work themselves on Saturdays and in the evenings after field work, through the winter of 1950, and the families up north sent what they could. The new church was dedicated on the fourth Sunday of May, 1951. That is the building we worship in today. The bell from the old belfry was hung in the new tower, and the old pulpit, which Brother Porter's son made, still stands at the front.

Within My Own Memory
I joined this church as a girl, and I have been its clerk since 1961. I have seen a great deal from my pew. When the movement came to Americus in 1963, some of our young people marched, and we prayed for them every Wednesday night. In 1970 the schools in this county were finally integrated, and I taught first grade in the new schools for my last seven years as I had in the old ones for thirty-one. We put in electric lights in 1948, a furnace in 1966, the fellowship hall in 1979 and indoor restrooms in 1984, which some of us thought we would never live to see. My husband, Deacon Clifford Bivens, served this church for forty years and is buried out back. Our pastor, the Reverend Gerard McCormick, has led us since 1990.

The Cemetery
Our founders are buried in the old part of the cemetery behind the church, under the cedars. Some of the oldest graves are marked with only a field stone, and the names are known now only because somebody remembered them and wrote them down. As clerk, I keep a map of the old section, with every grave I know of and who lies there. If you are looking for your people, write to me and I will look. Every year, the Saturday before homecoming, the young men of the church clean the graves, and on homecoming day the families bring flowers.

One Hundred Years
We are a small church. We have never had much money. We have outlasted the boll weevil, the Depression, the leaving, and a good many preachers, and we are still here, singing. The founders under the cedars could not have imagined this day, two hundred of their children's children coming home in automobiles from all over the country. But I believe they hoped for it. That is why they built the arbor.