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Index | Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12
Part 1
Up and Down Greasy Creek
Mabel Snyder returned from Sierra Leone in 1928 and wondered, "What now?'
She was the first United Brethren nurse appointed to Sierra Leone. But her first term ended, and nobody asked her to return. "We didn't realize you wanted to go back," someone later told her. But that was later, and too late.
Mabel Snyder had thought mission work would be her life. But the United Brethren church, in which she was raised, evidently didn't want her as a missionary. So, what now?
In the end, Mabel Snyder started her own United Brethren mission field.
First, she spent a decade here and there--at a Salvation Army women's and children's hospital in Cincinnati, at a Methodist mission in Tennessee, at a tuberculosis hospital in Lima, Ohio, as superintendent of nurses. In Colorado she started a hospital on nothing and ran it on nothing.
Then Pine Mountain Settlement School in Kentucky invited her to be the school nurse--which also meant being the community's doctor, druggist, and more. She took it.
Miss Snyder--that is what mountain people have always called her--noticed that the only religious work for miles around was the snake-handling church. What would it take to start something here? After a year, she got her chance to find out.
The story I heard is that the school didn't want her treating people who couldn't pay, and fired her after she rode to another community and set a man's leg for free. She merely concedes, "I got kicked out hard enough to land six miles down the creek."
She returned to Van Wert, Ohio, her childhood stomping grounds. There, a group of young women became interested in the Kentucky work and told her, "If you go back, well send someone with you."
Four of them "spied out the land" one weekend. Then in April 1938, Miss Snyder and one of those women, Miss Luella Miller, went down to stay. They rented a house in Big Laurel and set to work. They didn't waste any time. Two weeks later, 50 children and adults attended their first Sunday school in a schoolhouse. A week later, they began holding morning and afternoon Sunday schools at the snake church, upon the request of the congregation there.
The Women's Missionary Association got involved in 1939. They had been looking for something to do besides raise money for the Parent Board of Missions to spend. They came, they saw, they approved, and they assumed responsibility. The WMA dubbed the work "Laurel Mission," and promptly contributed $500 to help build a house and chapel.
Laurel Mission prospered.
Miss Miller and Miss Snyder began services in Big Laurel after cleaning out an unused store building. Community people helped, making crude, backless benches from scrap lumber and donating an oddly-shaped table for the pulpit. One Sunday, attendance reached 100. The Sunday evening service turned into a Christian Endeavor meeting, sometimes led by local young people.
Midweek prayer groups met in Big Laurel and at the Little Laurel schoolhouse, just down the road. The two missionaries held services in outlying schools, and in 1940 began Sunday schools in two more locations.
At the start, they divided their responsibilities. Miss Miller headed the religious work--young people's meetings, church services, Sunday schools, etc.--while Miss Snyder focused on the medical and social work.
Riding her faithful horse Gypsy, Miss Snyder traversed the mountains, treating whatever ailments she encountered and delivering unnumbered babies, usually for $5 each. Her little clinic was open daily. People came from all around, some carried in stretchers for miles across the mountains. During the first two years, she treated over 3600 people and visited 600 homes. At times, her heavy workload caused her to forego food and sleep for long periods.
Miss Miller left Kentucky in 1943. Miss Snyder stayed until 1958. She poured her heart into the mountain people for two decades before she, too, returned to Ohio.
But Laurel Mission remains.
Today, Miss Snyder is a legend of sorts up and down Greasy Creek. And when the mountain people recall memories of her, you can easily detect in their words, mixed with the gratitude, a large dose of awe.
Mountains engulf you as soon as you cross the border at Cincinnati, and you don't need an official "Welcome" sign to realize you're in Kentucky.
In late fall, dazzling colors--reds, yellows, oranges, browns, a few lingering greens--stretch miles across valleys until ending in blue at the summit of a distant ridge. Patches of farmland dot the landscape, and serene lakes nestle in mountain depressions.
The interstate occasionally passes a small settlement, and you wonder how many other settlements lie hidden in the hills, unbetrayed by four-lane freeways, so secluded that outsiders rarely see them. How many Big Laurels are back there? And how many Miss Snyders and Miss Millers have searched them out and taken them the Gospel?
The houses I see are generally small, rarely new. Many homes fit the Appalachian stereotype--old, rickety, rundown, unpainted. Others look quite nice. Most are somewhere in between. Wood piles, and often coal piles as well, lie in nearly every yard, awaiting winter just around the corner.
I pass through Pine Mountain, the village where Miss Snyder got her start. At the Living Waters Christian School, I turn down Road 2008 and drive alongside Greasy Creek all the way to the mission house--past Little Laurel UB church, through Big Laurel, and down the valley another three miles until the pavement ends.
There, on the left--hand side, is Cedar Chapel. And across the creek stands the impressive two-story Hodgeboom Memorial Home--the parsonage--where Laurel Mission director Titus Boggs and his wife Debbie have lived since 1981.
The Boggs name is only a few generations old. They started out in England as Livingstones; the doctor of "I presume" fame lurks somewhere in the family tree. A Livingstone moved into the area and built a house in swampy flatland, and people began calling him "the boggs man." The name stuck. Good-bye Livingstone.
When Titus was born in 1950, both of his parents, Alvin and Ruth Boggs, worked for Laurel Mission. Ruth came from Michigan in 1943, one of a couple dozen UB missionaries who have worked for the mission over the years, and ended up marrying a local boy. They now they live six miles up the road at Living Waters school, which they started three years ago.
Titus, like his father, attended Mt. Carmel high school, a Christian boarding school 100 miles away. And like his father, Titus found Christ there.
"Being a preacher's kid, I was expected to live a certain way," Titus told me. "I was religious on the outside, but I didn't have a change of heart until my freshman year of high school. Some wonderful, godly teachers were a great influence on my life."
Titus and Debbie, an Iowa girl, met at Kentucky Mountain Bible Institute. They married in 1973, and spent the next year at Asbury College, where Titus majored in Bible and social work. After that, Titus worked a year in the Public Assistance Office in Lexington. And then they moved back "home," serving as dorm parents at Pine Mountain Settlement School, where Titus attended grades 1-9 and where his father worked.
In August 1980, Bishop Raymond Waldfogel came for a visit. Titus had been assistant pastor under mission superintendent M. E. Burkett. Now the Burketts were leaving. Would Titus and Debbie take their place?
"No," Titus said. He and a partner had just started a little coal mine and bought a coal truck.
But he kept thinking about it. And when Bishop Waldfogel asked again in December, Titus said, "We'll give it a try." They moved into the almost-new parsonage in January.
The transition was pretty rough. "We had a lot to learn real fast," Titus says.
"Pretty much on our own, too," Debbie adds.
"We haven't been able to do as much as we'd like to do," Titus told me, "but the Lord has helped us."
As He did Miss Snyder and Miss Miller, and so many Laurel Mission workers since.
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