On Fri, Apr 26, 2019 at 5:47 AM Mateusz Konieczny <[email protected]> wrote: > 25 Apr 2019, 23:49 by [email protected]: >> Communities have drawn together to keep a bank, a supermarket and a garage >> going locally. They have also drawn together to keep a doctor. >> They don't draw together for a church. > > Depends on a community. The last one > certainly is not true for many places.
Certainly near me, there is hardly a village without a church. By the time the church is boarded up or repurposed, the village is well on the way to being a ghost town. They certainly outlast the schools - most kids in the rural villages are bused to central schools nowadays; and the supermarkets - many villages have never had more than a general store. (Often, the shopkeeper is also the postmaster.) In many cases, the church lent its name to the community. Not too far north of me, there are places named Saint-Henri, Saint-Huberts, ... that share their names with the parishes. (Anecdotally, around here, the French settlers did that in their naming; the Dutch and English generally did not.) As I think I mentioned earlier, the defunct 18th-century village that lends its name to the township where my brother lives is a ghost town - nothing remains but stone foundations, a fine bridge to nowhere, a few stone walls separating what once were kitchen gardens, and ... the church, rebuilt several times after fires, and still in occasional use on special occasions. (There's no longer a community to support it.) The church was maintained long after the smithy (the village was abandoned before the rise of the automobile), the store, and the schoolhouse were all gone. The church needed major repairs a few years ago, and the scattered inhabitants of the township raised a subscription to do the work. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
