At the former site of St. Valbert's Church, 3 miles to the Northeast of Versailles, OH, stands a graveyard wrapped within the agricultural embrace of an expanse of rolling cornfields, protected at some distance from the state highway the sound of whose wayfarers is carried on the wind. At a glance, it seems as peaceful, undisturbed, and natural as it might well have seemed over 150 years ago when a church dedicated to an obscure French saint still stood at the site. Indeed, its continuity with that history is palpable as ancient grave markers proclaim the memory of homesteading Catholics from as far back as the year the church was built--1839. This space--still thoroughly rural in its own way--nevertheless could not help but be deeply affected by the changes brought about by American modernism.
The photo with which I opened this entry is a prime example of these diverse, almost contradictory elements. On the east side of the graveyard, a chain-link fence has been constructed--not to keep people out, as it does not continue on either the north or south end of the yard, but most likely to keep debris in. On days such as the Friday I visited, the plains of western Ohio provide meager protection against winds that have hurriedly eddied across the unobstructed flats of the Great Plains to claim whatever remnants of Midwestern farm life aren't nailed down. One will note most clearly the plastic bouquet of flowers torn from one of the nearby graves and consigned to mark the resting place of the leaves of corn beneath it. Such a bouquet is unthinkable apart a cluster of "modern" ideas--most notably the modern commodification and industrialization of death. In times past, people might have lit a candle in a church for the dead. Such a gesture would have ensured that one's prayer and thoughts for a person would endure for days, perhaps a week, beyond the time of the actual visit. On the other hand, to leave real flowers at a grave would have been more a symbol of the passage of time and an admittance of mortality. Now, however, these plastic flowers can outdo both; they are not separated by distance as a candle would be and, in addition, they are "immortal" in that their blossoming never fades. They effectively cheat death as a reminder of the soul's immortality and offer a fitting memorial at the location of the deceased's mortal remains.
The leaves of corn, at first glance a sign of the continuity and continued non-urban-ness of the site, are in fact also an unmistakable byproduct of modern agricultural existence. The wind is by far the most natural of the forces necessary to bring these leaves to their current residence. What seems a straightforward endeavor--planting a field to corn--is bound up from start to finish with modernity. First, a farmer had to decide to plant corn, a decision bound up with the politics of the American Farm Bill, which provides heavy subsidies to corn farmers for the production, among many other things, of ethanol--itself a consequence of our fuel-hungry American need for circulation of goods and people. To produce the corn, hundreds of thousands of dollars of capital in tractors, tillers, drills, sprayers, combines, and labor was necessary. The result was a uniformly grazed field, most likely untouched from start to finish by human hands. Such a process certainly avoids the "messiness" of human gathering, which misses ears, leaves stalks upright, and makes planting next spring just generally more difficult. But in the process, it transforms these fields from combs for catching snow and other debris into wind tunnels that offer no resistance to wind-borne elements. Once the debris of stalks and leaves left the combine, it continued across perhaps many miles of equally uniform, manicured ground, encountering no significant obstructions until coming to rest against our chain-link fence in this graveyard.
Here is the site on Google Maps. The East end is where more recent graves have been placed. Here, for instance, is the Wogaman gravestone:
We learn this from the site that either Maxine or Robert (before he passed) picked a stone that emphasized their attachment to the land. This includes a billowing cumulonimbus cloud, perhaps forecasting rain and future fertility, complete with birds soaring on the wind, just as their souls fly to God. The structures that symbolize their connection to the land are a hip-roofed barn, (probably) a chicken coop, and a fence, all of which are bound up with modern ideas of prosperity and personal property--this land was theirs! All of this provides the backdrop for the centerpiece of the stone: the huge farming tractor poised at the edge of an expanse of untilled land, ready to pour over the plains bringing order and growth.
Of course, not everyone buried here was a farmer. Other notable gravestones indicate a variety of modern interests:
Of course, not everyone buried here was a farmer. Other notable gravestones indicate a variety of modern interests:
Unlike most of the Land of the Cross-Tipped Churches, which is predominantly German, this early graveyard reflects an almost exclusively French constituency. I will have to look more into that as I continue. The focus of the following image (taken facing to the north) is a memorial donated by the Grilliot family, whose presence throughout this part of the country is nearly ubiquitous:
Down the slight hill and to the left is the oldest portion of the yard. Here are three photos in the area.
The oldest grave (that I could find) in the lot, Henry Grillot (again, but spelled differently than the later Grilliot), is in the extreme Northwest corner of the yard. Now, one of the most frustrating aspects of my study of this church is of course the fact that the church doesn't exist anymore, nor were there any pictures taken of it before it was torn down, nor does anyone have a real clear idea of where the church even stood. But one can guess that the church would have been fairly closely located to these oldest graves, perhaps near the crucifixion monument in the picture above. One response to these factors might be to throw your hands in the air and say, "Why try to study the material culture of a place that doesn't even exist anymore?" But that is not my response. The original pastor
for this church, Fr. Louis Navarron, had considerable correspondence with the bishop, all of which is kept in the Archives of the Archdiocese of Cincinnati. Those will prove an invaluable resource (though they are effectively tri-lingual, as Fr. Navarron corresponded primarily in French, but also in English and Latin). My questions are about those places that stand on the edge of modernity, in the liminal space between the urban and the rural. The fact that the original church itself was taken down is in fact precisely what I was looking for--a rural casualty of urbanization and, perhaps, modernization. The questions I want answered before the project was over are: Why did Fr. Navarron pick this location for his mission church? Why did he decide (if in fact HE was the one who decided) to
move the community into Versailles (now St. Denis Church)? Why did they decide to tear the old church down? I have a few ideas already about why these happened, but I need to do more research before drawing conclusions.
I need to give a little background, perhaps, before I explain any more. St. Valbert was a monk from 7th c. in the eastern part of modern France. He was originally a hermit who was later elected the abbot of a community there for 40 years. To my knowledge, there are very few churches in his name; St. Valbert's may have been the only one in the United States, and only his abbey seems to bear his name in his native France. Here is the link to his (French) Wikipedia page (See the pictures at the bottom, perhaps), and here and here are things about the community, including a picture of the church. I don't (yet) know what led Fr. Navarron to name a church after St. Valbert in the US. He built the church, and ministered to a quite large geographical area, presumably by horseback. When the original church was taken down, eventually three churches came up in its place: St. Remy's in Russia (Pronounced Russie), St. Denis in Versailles (pronounces Versales), and Holy Family in Frenchtown. St. Denis is considered to be the actual continuation of the same parish, and they date their foundation to that of St. Valbert's. The first pastor of Holy Family is being researched for potential canonization by a guy in Rome, but from what I learned from the current pastor, Fr. Navarron and that other priest didn't get along too well. I'll have to dig into the sources on that. To this day, the entry to the graveyard at Holy Family contains a French inscription. Here's a picture of, first, Holy Family, and second, St. Remy's:
The inscription outside Holy Family reads: "Heureux les morts qui meuerent dans le Seigneur," or "Happy are the dead who die in the Lord," from Revelations. Holy Family was built in 1866. St. Remy's has a Lourdes Shrine dedicated to American soldiers of WWI, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam:
The Miami-Erie Canal was completed in 1845, and signaled a turning point for the immigration of farmers into the area. This technological feat is, I now suspect, the primary cause of the move of St. Valbert's into Versailles. I will have to back that up, but as an urban community arose, it made sense for the church to follow suit, probably. One kind of circulation led to another--that of farmers to a different pattern for the local priest. The trend continues--the school at St. Denis's Parish now takes a single busload of students who live about an hour away. The bus is just makes that one stop, and gets to school about the same time as the others picking up closer students. Inside St. Denis, they have a drawing of St. Valbert's Church. I asked what the source for the drawing was, and was assured that it is based on a description written in the records in Cincinnati. I'll have to keep my eyes out for that. In any case, here's what they think it looked like:
St. Valbert's Church has a history that is deeply bound up with modern industrialization, urbanization, standardization, circulation, and commodification. Even as these factors are abundantly clear in the community in the present day, the roots of this influence trace back to the very roots of this Catholic community. I hope to study the early days of this congregation, from its construction in 1839 until sometime into the 1850s and 1860s when the parish was relocated into nearby Versailles, OH, in order to highlight how the various influences of modernity affected and changed the community, for better and for worse.
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