Faith focused: Cornerstones of a successful community
By A. Ray Lee
I discovered as a young minister the greatest resources of a community are found in the character and strength of its people.
A century ago, my father graduated from Morgan County High School in Hartselle. He was older than most of his classmates. At the time there were no high schools in the area. It would have been more convenient for him to begin full-time farming.
I don’t know what prompted him or the particulars of how he planned as a young man to farm in the crop growing season and board with encouraging people in Hartselle during an abbreviated term of study until he earned enough credits to receive a diploma. When I was a child, he often told stories of those days and his athletic prowess.
When he graduated, he married and moved back to the farm. After a few years of sharecropping, he bought a small farm on which he raised cotton and a family of four sons. His decisions and actions provided stability for his family. He no longer worried about where we would be living the next year.
Education provides a cornerstone upon which one can build a life of stability. Hartselle has long had the reputation of having one of the strongest school systems in the state. It has been an academic leader. Its sports programs have produced winning teams. It has led the way in providing facilities for an ever-growing student population. People are drawn to the area to enroll their children in the award-winning school system. Teachers continue to vie for open positions.
Hartselle has other enviable strengths. I was ordained by Lebanon Baptist Church in 1960. I am now retired, but I spent more than 60 years in pastoral ministry. Most of those years were spent in Morgan County. I have had the privilege of pastoring or preaching at least once in more than 50 different churches where God-fearing and patriotic members live out their faith. I’ve served as director of missions for the Morgan Baptist Association. I have been asked by many ministers to recommend them to a pastor search committee in the county. Prospective pastors rarely have turned down the opportunity to accept a church in Morgan County.
Although I grew up in the Falkville school district about four and a half miles west of the Hartselle Civic Center, my postal address has a Hartselle zip code. I have owned property just outside the police jurisdiction for many years. Lately, as available land in the city limits that is suitable for development has dwindled, new houses and subdivisions are creeping ever closer to my property line.
Almost weekly I receive unsolicited cash offers on farm property which I deliberately turned back to nature years ago. The amount offered continues to increase regularly for land that sold for one dollar an acre circa 1935. Last week I received a new tax assessment with a substantial increase over the past years.
Recently I received a call from a relative in Huntsville to ask if it were possible for me to squeeze out a lot for them to build upon. Last month one of the new poll workers looked at my information. Noting that she was my neighbor she asked what I planned to do with the land which joined hers.
Why? Because more people have discovered Hartselle and the values it offers for family living. They want to raise their families here.
Sorry, my land is not for sale in my lifetime.
