Editor:
    Last Monday night many of us in the Emit Community were to learn of the destruction, by fire, of Emit Grove Baptist Church. Though not a member of this historic church, I have many memories and connections.
    Back in 1980 I visited Raleigh Kennedy, son of Stephen Kennedy, to find out the date his father built his home a half mile in front of the church. My father bought this home in 1930. Raleigh Kennedy could not tell me when the home was built — as children we heard several times that this was the first frame house built in Bulloch County after the war — but he told me of an incident which made the story too good to have been anything but the truth. After the Civil War a German immigrant from the Black Forest came to this area. He was a skilled craftsman and built the Steve Kennedy home as well as the Olliff-Durrence home on Kennedy Bridge Road. Raleigh Kennedy, born in 1890, remembered seeing a group of men standing around an alligator, which had been pulled to his father’s home from a cypress pond on the place. Someone punched the gator, causing it to switch his tail. Everyone jumped back to avoid being hit. In the group was Edward Ringwall, visiting his old friend Steve Kennedy. He was building Emit Grove Church at the time. So Raleigh Kennedy had to be about 5 or 6 years old at the time to remember the incident.
    The last time I was in the church the walls were straight, the floor level and the ceiling spanning some 60 feet was as straight and level as it was the first time I saw it in 1931. There were no interior columns. This church, built of original growth yellow pine, survived several severe hurricanes and decades of weathering. The members can be proud of the way it was maintained. Emit Grove Church will be rebuilt, but it cannot be replaced. The poor boy, who allegedly set the fire, does not know what he destroyed.