Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, August 19, 1993 TAG: 9308190327
SECTION: NEIGHBORS PAGE: E-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: FRANCES STEBBINS CORRESPONDENT
DATELINE: FINCASTLE LENGTH: Medium
The clocks remind Caldwell of the passing days when she will leave the community where she has spent more than 40 years and return to the town of her childhood, Rockland, Maine. There recently to visit her two sisters and a brother, she found herself wondering how her girlhood friends could have grown grandchildren.
Except for summer visits, she hasn't been back for 45 years.
Then she reflected on the thousands of children to whom she has taught basic Christian doctrines in the Botetourt County Weekday Religious Education program and the dozens to whom she taught sacred music at her church, Mill Creek Baptist, until her retirement the end of June.
There's a sadness to this kind of thinking but satisfaction too, she remarked recently. Following her calling to education - first perceived in her years at Gordon College in Boston during World War II - has enriched her years in the county with innumerable friends, she said.
But the time has come to return to her family in New England. She will live with a sister and be able to visit often with her other two siblings and to involve herself more in the lives of several nieces and nephews, even an infant great-niece.
Her leaving Botetourt is prompted by two events not uncommon in a woman of 69. For nearly 20 years arthritis in her knees and hips has sent Caldwell to the hospital for six surgeries. A cane and other walking aids have kept her busy life possible, but the last operation in the spring convinced her that living alone in a house with many memories "is not in my best interest."
The other event was the death 14 months ago of James M. Caldwell, the farmer she married 32 years ago. Their original 40 acres adjoining two schools and other county facilities has been sold down to six which surround the white frame home on Virginia 630. Soon Caldwell will put her place up for sale and dispose of some of the furnishings.
When Caldwell left Maine in 1947 after completing teachers' training at Gordon, she knew little about the rural county in Western Virginia to which she had been steered by another Gordon graduate, Evelyn Langford, now retired in Roanoke.
Langford also had come to Botetourt from Maine in 1936 to start the county's first religious education program for children enrolled in the public schools. That, Caldwell noted, was long before many court challenges to such Christian instruction took it out of most counties and forced Botetourt to make adjustments to keep the classes going.
Caldwell retired from active teaching in the mobile classrooms five years ago, but she had continued her interest and said she is pleased that Nancy Young and the Rev. Robert McRae will continue it this fall.
"The county is growing and changing so much," she said. "Years ago, nearly all the parents were happy to have their children in our program. Today there are so many children who don't get any regular religious instruction. I regret that."
In 1947 when Caldwell came to Fincastle, she rode buses with friends around to the nine elementary schools in the big county. She lived in a boarding house in the historic town and remembers the thrill of being able to buy her own car from a woman who was leaving for mission service.
A friend in the boarding house married Jim Caldwell and Miriam kept in touch with her over the years.
Caldwell remembers being single and enjoying women's activities at Fincastle Baptist Church and starting the town's beautification as a member of the Castle Garden Club. As a Northern Baptist - now American Baptist - in Maine, she said she always held to a theological position now called "moderate" in Southern Baptist circles.
She began choir directing at Mill Creek Baptist after taking a three-year break from religious education and enrolling at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville for its music program.
In the mid-1950s she moved to Bassett and for two years was on the staff of Pocahontas Bassett Baptist Church there. But by 1957 she was back in Fincastle convinced, she said, that her calling was teaching school children. About this time too, her boarding house friend died, and in 1961, she married widower Jim Caldwell and moved into his family home just north of town.
Since her husband's death, Caldwell and several younger women from Mill Creek Church have developed a weekly ministry to about 30 residents of the Brian Center nursing home. When she returns to Maine, where there are many retired folk living on the picturesque coast, she may become involved in a similar program, she said.
by CNB