Page:The McClure Family.djvu/37

Rh frames, the labor-hardened hands of a generation that loved a church without a prelate—a generation that fled from the oppression that harrassed their ancestors for centuries, and like them ungovernable in their demands for the unalienable rights of man—a generation of men and women that accomplished in their poverty what wealth cannot purchase, and reared another generation to hazard death for freedom of conscience and liberty of person, "for a State without a king." Such a one you may find at TINKLING SPRING in Augusta County, Va.

Going down from the splendid prospect from Rockfish Gap to the edge of the "late country," as the Sage of Monticello termed it, you enter the bounds of the oldest congregation in Augusta; one that contends with Opequon for the honor of being the first in the great Valley, and the first in the State after the days of Makemie—the congregation of the Triple Forks of the Shanandoah, which formerly stretched across the Valley from the Gap to the Western Ridge in the horizon. You are, too, in the bounds of that division of the congregation named Tinkling Spring, which assembled to worship God in the Southeastern part of the congregation, the Old Stone Church being the place for assemblage for the Northwestern part of the settlement traversed by the paved road. Ministers were few and men went far to worship; far as it would now be estimated, as then eight or ten miles were an ordinary ride—or walk—for a Sabbath morning to the house of God.

But we were searching for the graves of the settlers. Come to this yard to the west of the church, surrounded by a stone wall in the shape of a section of a horseshoe. * * * * Come down now to this Southwest end. In the irregular piece of ground, surrounded on three sides by a stone wall, full of mounds, but not a single inscription. Here is the resting place of the ashes of the ancestors of many families in Virginia and Kentucky. Men whose names are woven by their descendants in the web of political and religious courts in colors too vivid to be unnoticed or mistaken. Here are the sepulchres of the men that