Brother Bill, I never saw you and Helen kissing in church.” Standing under the shade tree near his wife’s grave, Bill Hall was showing Pastor Chuck Shaver a photo of the couple doing exactly that on their 45th wedding anniversary.
The 83-year-old deacon of Pumpkin Center Baptist Church in Quinton grinned at the comment, creases spreading across his face from his twinkling blue eyes.
“Well, then, Pastor — you must have had your eyes closed,” Hall said.
Helen Hall, who passed away in 2002, was a “feisty” Navy machinist third class in World War II who later became acquainted with Army veteran Bill Hall while riding the streetcar to and from Birmingham-Southern College.
The couple married soon after and raised six children — nearly a football team, Hall joked. “She was somethin’ else,” he said — a faithful wife and a fun person to be around.
“She wore a ballerina’s tutu to our fall festival just a few years back,” said a church member standing in the small group lingering around Helen’s grave.
But earlier still Hall’s wife did something perhaps considered more weighty for the small church — she was instrumental in starting the very cemetery Bill Hall would eventually bury her in — just feet from the front door of their home church.
“It’s a little cemetery, but we’re proud of it,” said Ann Files, whose daughter Camilla is buried opposite Helen Hall across the cemetery. And Files can tell the story of each person buried between them — their best moments and their worst.
It’s that living history that inspired Pumpkin Center to hold its first-ever Decoration Day ceremony June 13, complete with singing, dinner on the grounds and the storytelling that keeps the small church as close and connected as ever.
“The day of the ceremony would have been my daughter’s 43rd birthday, so that makes it even more special,” Files said, glancing across the 24 newly decorated graves.
Church members of all ages turned out in force to plant flowers, hang bouquets, clean headstones and cut grass in the cemetery and around the church the day before the service. And Pumpkin Center, which usually averages 50 in attendance, packed out with 75 on Decoration Day to hear the preaching of former pastor Ed Frazier.
Two prayed to receive salvation.
It’s exciting, and it “just shows we’re growing,” Shaver said, noting that the rich history the church was celebrating on one side of the small church building soon would be complemented by the new church building to be built on the other side.
And though the church is 65 years old, the cemetery is young enough that the stories of those in it still inspire the congregation on a personal level.
“Helen painted the mural for the baptistry,” Shaver said, showing off a sweeping river covering the wall behind it in Pumpkin Center’s sanctuary. She started two libraries, too, he added — one there and one in Fultondale. “A great lady, she was.”
Right there in the cemetery is a history of growth and ministry, Shaver said. And the future lies just beyond that little plot of land.
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