My Grandaddy Millard F Combs was the minister at Fries Baptist Church many moons ago. My Dad was born in 1922 in Cleveland, VA. When he was about 8, my Grandaddy was hired by the Fries Baptist Church to become their minister - so this was say 1930. He stayed at the church until 1945 or so. You'll notice in the photo that the dates on the church are 1903 - 1937. The church was founded in 1903, shortly after the mill and the town were built. They built this brick church in 1937.
During the Depression, people came to Fries to work. The mill was going and there were jobs to be had. My uncle Roger Combs tells me that people would come in on the train hoping to get a job. They would camp out along the river for days or weeks waiting for something to open up - they were what we would call today "homeless". They would go to my Grandparents' house (the Baptist parsonage) to get food because it was part of the mission of the church to feed the homeless.
By the way, this blog is supposed to be about art & photography. The photograph accompanying the blog is very hard to get. The church is right on the street and there are power lines running right in front of it. If you get far away enough to get the whole building in, you have power lines running through your photo - quite unattractive. So to get this photo, I used an ultra wide angle lens and stood at the foot of the steps and pointed the camera up to get the whole building. But this causes what's called "parallax effect". The building looks likes it's falling in on itself and it looks a lot shorter than you would expect.. So I was able in Photoshop to pull the sides of the building out and also make it taller.
The photo was made early in the morning. The sun rises in the East, which is to your right as you're looking at the building. The sun being low in the sky gives the photo some interesting shadows.
See the before and the after pic below:
