Mississippi - New Hope Missionary Baptist Church

As we left Destin to return home to Arkansas, I put the route into Google Maps. It would be a long drive (especially with two kids in the car), and the route that my phone picked out for us took us to Mobile and then along a series of roads that cut across Alabama and Mississippi. Luckily our toddler loves cars and doesn't seem to mind sitting in a carseat very long.

I was thrilled to see that our way home would actually pass by the town of Estill in Mississippi, which has a neat old abandoned church. And after several hours of driving, we finally arrived at the New Home Missionary Baptist Church, which was built in 1918.



The wooden Gothic Revival church has been described as "a rare example of an early twentieth century rural African American Delta church." The church survived the Great Flood of 1927, since it sits along some high ground near Deer Creek.





Like most Delta communities, Estill was once a thriving little town. But now few people live here, and the old church has been abandoned for decades. It was named as one of the 10 Most Endangered Historic Places in Mississippi in 2017. In 2019, the church was awarded a $24,500 grant from the Mississippi Heritage Trust, which added a new metal roof to the building. The roof helps keep rain water from entering the structure and causing further deterioration.



While there aren't any church services held here, some members of the old congregation have returned. There is a small cemetery next to the church, which has a few recent burials. One of those burials is from a Mrs. Rebecca "Li'l Bit" Ellis, who was born in 1892 and who passed away in 2002 at the age of 109. It's hard to imagine what all she must have seen and experienced in those years.



It started raining when we were there, with ominous gray clouds hanging over the horizon.



A few hours later, a tornado would rip through this part of Mississippi. Sadly, twenty-six people would be killed as the massive storm hit the towns of Rolling Fork and Black Hawk.

We drove across the river and made it into Arkansas, and actually drove through the storm cell that would later develop into tornadoes in Mississippi. It was bad then, we actually had to pull over in Dumas to wait out a heavy band of rain. We made it through the storm as we neared Pine Bluff, and saw the sun try to break through the heavy clouds. It was near sunset, so the light turned golden as it met with the dark gray storm clouds.



It seemed so bizarre then, to have driven through a place just hours before it would be hit by a tornado. You just never know when a bad storm will hit, and it seemed so strange to have been so close. Of course we would learn what it would be like to experience all that first-hand, when a tornado moved through our neighborhood just a few days later.