Back to the Vanished Church

Maya and I went to our ceramics class this morning, and I drew the cat-shaped cookie jar that Maya has sculpted and was painting underglaze on today.

Then this afternoon my friend Ann, who is visiting from Vermont, and I went back down to the building site where the lost church building is.  We studied it for a while, looking at its apparent flatness from various angles and beginning to see more and more:  the floor line, the basement, the stone foundation, a little window up high in the roof peak.  Then along came a tour of downtown, and the tour guide was showing the tourists the vanished church.  We joined in and asked him questions.  He told us that the building was the earliest Presbyterian church, built in 1836.  The current Presbyterian church is right across the alley from the building site with the vanished church.  The guide said that when the new church was built around 1880 the old church was enclosed by a larger building and used in some way as part of the new building.  Then when the "new" building was razed this summer, the marks from the little enclosed church revealed the outlines of that building.

Ann and I came home and did research on line and found some ghost stories about the Presbyterian church on Church Street in Asheville.  My plan is to go to the downtown library and look for the Sanborne insurance maps to try and find the footprint of the 1836 church.

Late tonight I drew five old ceramic marbles that I got at an antique place in Goshen, Indiana, a number of years ago,