Education: Make a Little Chamber…

Even before dawn the people began arriving at the clearing on the mountain, just two miles from Pineville, Ky. They came in trucks, cars, and on foot, swarming up the green mountainside 700 strong, to the Clear Creek Mountain Preachers Bible School. There they unloaded the hammers, saws and boards they had brought with them, and by sunup were hard at work.

It was the Baptist school’s 25th anniversary, and the 700 men & women were on hand with a special birthday present. They were all Baptists—doctors, lawyers, coal miners and merchants who had come from as far away as North Carolina, Virginia and Tennessee. Through their churches and clubs they had heard that Pastor L. C. Kelly and his 163 students were in desperate need of new family cottages for the married men among them. The 700 volunteers had offered to build them for the school.

All day the hammering echoed up & down the mountain—more noise than the little campus had ever heard, since the day Pastor Kelly first opened it in 1926 with twelve would-be mountain preachers. By 8 a.m. the floor beams were down on the foundations prepared beforehand. By noon, when the basket lunches were served, the main framework of the cottages was up. By 3 p.m. there were walls; by 4, doors and windows. By sunset, men were working on the roofs.

To honor the big house-raising, the Pineville Bakery had donated a giant cake that bore on its icing a verse from the Second Book of Kings: “Let us make a little chamber, I pray thee, on the wall; and let us set for him there a bed . . . and it shall be, when he cometh to us, that he shall turn in thither.” The “little chamber” that the 700 built that day for Pastor Kelly and his school turned out to be 19 brand-new, four-room cottages. By nightfall, as the people drove away, lights were already burning in some of them.