Two Alabamians set out to celebrate state’s oldest churches on film, in calendars

During a chance reunion at a seminar on Rick Warren’s “The Purpose Driven Life” a few years back, old work associates Bob Couch and Joe Harrington discovered that even in retirement, they had a lot in common.
   
Couch, the first head of Auburn University’s department of rehabilitation and special education, and Harrington, who was in similar professorial work at Troy University, share more than old college war stories and state pensions — they share the purpose-driven hobby of photographing Alabama’s oldest wooden churches.
   
“We’re both retired college professors, and we’d been friends for many years but hadn’t seen each other since we’d retired,” Couch said. “After that seminar, my wife and I went to Joe’s house for coffee with him and his wife and we got to talking. We found that both of us had an interest in photographing these old wooden churches, primarily because they were disappearing.”
   
Harrington tells the story of driving through the back roads of Russell County and spying an old church off the road. He used to drive by there quite a bit, and one day, he stopped and said to himself, “Somebody needs to take a picture of that.” When he and Couch got together, he found out that Couch had been thinking the same thing.
   
“We started around the Opelika area and just went out from there,” Harrington said.
   
He took photography courses in high school and at Troy, but neither he nor Couch claim to be anything but amateur photographers. And while Harrington has “gone digital,” Couch remains loyal to his 35mm.
   
“I say God has to be with us because we are doing photography way over our heads,” Harrington said. 
   
Both men are Methodists but Couch was raised a Baptist in northwest Alabama. “My wife also was raised a Baptist, but she jumped ship and went to the Methodist church and I followed her,” he said.
   
But the project, Couch is quick to add, is nondenominational.
   
The project of which he speaks is the series of calendars the two have produced since 2005. Titled An Enduring Spiritual Legacy, each calendar features the black-and-white photographs Harrington and Couch have taken of 19th-century, wooden Alabama churches since their collaboration began in 2003. The calendars feature one church per month, and many of the churches are Baptist. Both the horizontal and vertical versions of the 2006 calendars feature Baptist churches on the cover — Lyon Chapel (formerly St. Stephens Baptist Church) on the University of Mobile campus and Philadelphia Baptist Church in Monroe County.
   
Wadley Baptist Church member Betty Cleveland saw one of the 2005 calendars and invited Couch and Harrington to shoot her church, which was the featured church for November in the 2006 calendar. Below each photo is a brief synopsis of that church’s history. 
   
The caption for November tells how in 1908, the Wadley church was built and then destroyed by a tornado in the afternoon following its first Sunday services. But intent on their own enduring spiritual legacy, the congregation rebuilt. 
   
“We ordered 100 calendars and the congregation just loved them,” Cleveland said. “I sent them to former pastors and a good many of our members who are homebound, and they’ve just been thrilled with them. We might have four or five left.” 
   
Cleveland’s husband, Jim, has deep ties to Rehobeth Baptist Church, Randolph (near Lawley), in Bibb Baptist Association, one of the first churches torched in the rash of church arsons in early February. 
   
Jim Cleveland attended Rehobeth Baptist — first formed in 1819 — as a child, and his grandfather helped rebuild the church after it first burned in 1912. It burned the second time before Couch or Harrington could get to it. 
   
“These churches are disappearing. Either arsonists are burning them down or they’re either getting bricked over or torn down and replaced because as congregations expand, the next step is to tear it down, get central air conditioning and a brick church, so the old historic buildings, a hundred years or more old, are torn down and forgotten,” Couch said. 
   
“Our goal is to take photographs of these hundred-year-old, wooden Alabama churches that are such a great part of our state’s history, and they’re such a great part because my grandparents, and even my parents, grew up in rural areas, and these churches were their mainstay.” 
   
The two friends have also produced note cards featuring some of their “prettier” photos and offer them as well as the calendars at volume discounts to their subject churches that want to sell them for fund-raisers. 
   
Twenty-nine of their photos hang framed inside the Pastoral Care and Counseling Center in Auburn. 
   
They are thinking of putting out a book. 
   
Though by no means an obsession, Couch and Harrington approach the churches they document — 300 and counting — not only with film and filters but also with an established historical awareness and a growing sense of duty. They are in talks with Samford University in Birmingham and other universities and organizations about permanently archiving their work. 
   
“It’s our little contribution and it’ll be a permanent contribution,” Couch said. 
   
“We’ll be gone in another 20 years, but we’ll have these archives lined up for students and scholars and that’s a thrilling idea.”
   
For more information, e-mail enduringlegacy@charter.net.