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| Northeast corner of Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church |
Pleasant Ridge Baptist Church
One of the things I enjoy is finding new ways to get home. Driving the backroads is a welcome break from the US-169 to I-29 to I-435 to MO-45 to MO-9 and back every day coming to and from work. County Highway P east from Weston, MO is a pretty little drive with lots of fields and houses, old and new. Around one turn of Hwy P is a cemetery with some noticeably old headstones intermingled with newer stones. Next to that is a quaint little one-story brick church with a gabled roof based in the Greek Revival style.
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| Historic marker |
Pleasant Ridge United Baptist Church was built in 1844 by a Missionary Baptist splinter group from a Old School/Hard Shell Baptist congregation. John W. Vineyard, Joseph Nower, William Gabbert, and Jacob Cox each provided a quarter-section of land (center of Section 5; Township 53N; Range 35W) to be used to build the church and cemetery. The bricks were fired in a kiln located on the Vineyard farm. The material was likely from the Pennsylvanian Era Weston Shale, which is about 80 feet thick and outcrops between the Stanton Limestone formation and the Iatan Limestone. When the building was constructed, it had a balcony gallery for slaves and a door in the south wall (now bricked over) for access to the cemetery. The builder was John Sanford and the founding minister was Rev. Albert P. Williams.
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| South side of church with bricked over door in gap between windows |
The church has been used by a congregation for most of its existence. The building survived a roof collapse in 1861 and fire in 1868. It was likely in this time frame that the slave gallery disappeared. Metal Corinthian columns were installed in 1882, the pews were installed in 1902, and globe lights date to the electrification of the building in 1930. The building was not used from about 1939 to the 1950s, but has been occupied by a congregation ever since.
Mary Owens Vineyard
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| Mary Vineyard grave marker |
You never know where you will stumble across the marker of a historically significant figure, but you'll almost always come across interesting headstones as you walk through a graveyard. On my walk through the graveyard, I ran across the stones of what turned out to be some of the founding members of the church, the Vineyards. At least one meeting that led to the founding of the church took place in John Vineyard's log schoolhouse. In all there were three Vineyard brothers: John, Jesse and Bryce (Brice). The Vineyard brothers were educators and founded an academy located about a half mile to the south of the church. The academy was known as Pleasant Ridge College. The chapel of the college was used as a meeting place for the congregation while repairs were being made to the church following the 1861 roof collapse.
Jesse Vineyard's family headstones occupy a place of prominence towards the front of the cemetery and near the church. One of the best preserved stones there is that of Mary S. Vineyard, Jesse's wife. Jesse's partly broken headstone is next to Mary's. He had died in 1862 and Mary followed in 1877.
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| New marker placed by Robert Bloch of the Block Foundation |
Mary's grave had a newer marker in front of it and upon moving towards it, I found the stone to the left, which stated that Mary S. Vineyard was none other than Mary S. Owens Vineyard - the woman who had turned down (to his consternation AND relief) the marriage proposal of a young(ish) Abraham Lincoln. Even though we are surrounded by memorials and burials of giants of western expansion, it seemed fantastic that this person I had read of in biographies of Lincoln was actually buried in the old Platte Purchase. However, it takes just a cursory look at old letters to see that Mary Owens is indeed buried in Weston, MO.
So how does one meet an Abraham Lincoln, attract his attention and then turn down his proposal? All of that seems to be a comedy of runaway circumstance viewed through the lens of what would become, not what was at that time. While Abraham Lincoln was building his reputation, he was far from "The Great Emancipator" or "Savior of the Union" when all of this took place.
In 1831, while building a flatboat for Dennis Offut, Lincoln lived with a man named Bowling Green. This man had lived in Kentucky, and knew the Hanks family fairly well. He would judge that Abraham had inherited his good sense from his mother Nancy Hanks' family. Lincoln grew close to Mr. Green and came to view him as a mentor and the father to whom he wished he had been born. When Thomas Lincoln lay dying, Abraham refused to see him, but when Green died suddenly in 1842, Lincoln was profoundly affected and fell into a deep depression. One of Mr. Green's neighbors was a woman named Elizabeth Abell. Lincoln struck up a friendship with the Abell family and lived with them off and on in New Salem, Illinois for several years.
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| Abraham Lincoln c. 1847 |
After the death of Ann Rutledge in 1835 from typhoid fever (a woman thought by many to be Lincoln's first love), Lincoln became quite depressed, a sight that pained Mrs. Abell greatly. When interviewed after Lincoln's assassination, she described him as social, lively, good natured, never rash, backwards, not eccentric but also not visionary. She thought of him as the best natured man that she ever knew. These qualities led her to try to play matchmaker between Lincoln and her sister, Mary Owens. One of the stories is that Mrs. Abell told Lincoln in 1834 that she was going back to Kentucky and told him that she would bring her sister back if Lincoln agreed to marry the sister, to which he jokingly assented.
The proposition got a bit more real when Mrs. Abell left on her visit. At this point, Lincoln was a bit excited. He had met Mary Owens in 1833 briefly and recalled her as being a "handsome" woman, intelligent, good conversationalist and lively. Reading letters to friends, you can see that he would lean to excitement, then dread. When she got there in 1836/7, he noticed that she had gained quite a bit of weight, had lost some teeth, and somehow was not as animated as he remembered. It may be also that he weighed the poverty of his upbringing with the wealth of the Owens family. The difference in social position worried him a bit, but he entered into correspondence with her when he left for the state legislature in Vandalia, IL. In the end, he was determined to keep his word but to his initial relief (followed by feeling insulted) Mary declined his proposal. She would later say "I think I did on one occasion say to my sister, who
was very anxious for us to be married, that I thought Mr. Lincoln was deficient
in those little links which make up the great chain of woman's happiness."
Mary Owens left New Salem in 1838 and never wrote to Lincoln again. She went back to Kentucky and married Jesse Vineyard in 1841/2. This was probably a better match, as Jesse lived the academic life that was valued by the Owens family at the time. Jesse was well schooled in proper etiquette (a deficiency in the young Lincoln) as well as being well to do. When he started the college at Pleasant Ridge, he was a slave-owning gentleman farmer. The family retained much of its Kentucky flavor and it is said that Mary Vineyard's sons served the Confederacy during the Civil War, although I cannot substantiate that claim using available databases. It would make almost as good a story as Lincoln's Confederate brothers-in-law and cousins!
Six degrees....
After this blog entry was published, one of my friends from high school, Gale Vineyard, wrote a note that Mary Owens Vineyard was her great-great-grandmother. Good thing that I didn't go to elementary school with Gale. I can see THAT show-and-tell day. Me: Here is my bust of Abraham Lincoln (Avon aftershave decanter). Gale: Here are my great-great-grandmother's letters from Abraham Lincoln! How does a kid compete with that? (Howls, Howls of laughter!).
Getting There
From MO-45 south of Weston, turn east onto Co Hwy P and follow about a mile and half to Woodruff Road.
Waypoint: Latitude: 39.432600 N; Longitude: 94.854612 W
Street Address: 18797 N Co Rd P, Weston, MO
Further Reading
Abraham Lincoln, Mary Owens and the Accidental Engagement
Abraham Lincoln and Mary Owens
National Register of Historic Places Application
Mr. Lincoln and Friends
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