Old Stone Church is home for county’s history

If beauty is only skin deep, Ringgold’s Old Stone Church can best be described as neat but homely, but if beauty truly lies within, this plain building could be likened to a supermodel.

For merely 160 years the plain building at the intersection of U.S. Highway 41 and state Route 2 has been part of Northwest Georgia history.

Constructed between 1850-1852 from stone quarried at the base of White Oak Mountain and the Stubblefield farm, it has served as church, hospital and, since a complete restoration in 1997, as museum and home for the Catoosa County Historical Society.

“The county bought the building from Tennessee Temple in the mid-1990s and turned operations over to the Society,” said Eddie Jordan, a curator at the museum. “This place was a wreck when we took it over – we hauled about six dump truck loads of debris out of the building.”

During a six-month restoration, bloodstained floors from the building being a makeshift hospital in 1863 were found when worn carpeting was removed.

“Surgeons used doors on trestles as operating tables,” Jordan said. “They’d cut off an arm or leg rather than risk infection and pitch the amputated parts out the window into wagons.”

Jordan said those limbs were hauled to a cemetery located behind the church and buried in unmarked mass graves.

But while bloodstained floorboards and church pews marred by horses teeth (pews were tilted and used for feed troughs) were found and preserved, other reminders of the building’s Civil War past were lost forever.

“The original walls were unfinished stone, but at some point it was decided to stucco over the rock to make it brighter inside,” Jordan said. “The only drawback was that it covered over where wounded soldiers had scratched their names into the mortar joints between stones when the church was used as a hospital after the Battle of Chickamauga.”

Names may no longer be visible, but Jordan pointed out one section of original stonework that was preserved and is visible through a viewing window on the former church’s original back wall.

“So many locals have seen the building but haven’t visited,” he said. “We get people coming in that say ‘I’ve lived here 60 years and never been inside that church.”

Open and staffed four days a week by Society volunteers, the Old Stone Church holds a wealth of artifacts and memorabilia from the area’s prehistoric past, its early days as an American Indian settlement, its Civil War heritage up to the present day.

Cases of fossils from the time when this part of the world was seabed are adjacent those containing arrowheads and bone tools.

Articles of everyday life, when the county was primarily an agricultural community, are displayed and adjoin displays from the days when the soldiers outnumbered civilians in Catoosa County – both during the days of the U.S. Army Post at Fort Oglethorpe and during the Civil War.

The collection includes Civil War and Reconstruction era articles. Aside from the usual collection of Minié balls, buttons and belt buckles – both Union and Confederate – is a complete Ku Klux Klan outfit.

Not everything about the former church is related to the Civil War. The building also is famous as being the site where the famous gospel hymn “Leaning On the Everlasting Arms” was first performed. And draped across a back pew is a chenille spread, a reminder of the days when Highway 41 was known as “Peacock Alley” for the brightly colored textiles that eventually led to the area becoming “Carpet Capital of the World.”

The museum is open to the public, at no charge, from 1 to 5 p.m. Thursday through Sunday.