The fellowship is as sweet as the iced tea around the long table at Butch’s Chicken House in Jonesboro on the second Thursday of the month.
That’s when the Ladies’ Bible Class of Mountain View Baptist Church gathers for an evening out together.
Never mind that their church is defunct and their town has disappeared, eaten up by Atlanta’s Hartsfield International Airport almost 20 years ago. Two or three dozen of them, their husbands and other former members of their church drive in from across south metro Atlanta, determined to keep the spirit of the Sunday school class alive.
“Everything that happened happened at church,” says Louise Brown, 74, former lunchroom manager of the old College Park High School, who now lives in Union City, Ga. “We raised all our children there–all of us. Everything centered around the church. We all feel more like brothers and sisters than friends.”
Mountain View, about a one-square-mile area on the north edge of Clayton County, was chartered in 1949 as a town and in 1956 as a city, and was home to about 2,000 people. It was dissolved in the late 1970s by the Georgia General Assembly upon the recommendation of the Clayton delegation, which branded it “a blight on Clayton County” because of feuding and corruption in local government. At the time, Mountain View had legal sales of beer and wine, and the rest of the county was dry.
The death knell of the community was already sounding, in the form of noise from the jet planes of Atlanta’s rapidly expanding air traffic. Families on the west side of Old Dixie Highway and the railroad tracks went first, when about 400 homes were bought out with $16.5 million in federal and local funds in a land acquisition project that began about the time the city’s government ended. Businesses closed and most of the few remaining residents from the east side left.
In the mid-1980s, the former city officially became a part of Hartsfield when work crews dug up part of the area for fill dirt for runway extension.
The community of Mountain View, which took its name from the view of Stone Mountain possible on clear, sunny days, long predated the town’s incorporation, as did the Baptist church, which was incorporated in 1938.
Hazel Green of Rex, Ga., a retired hair stylist from the old Davison’s Department Store and now in her 80s, was 15 when she moved to Mountain View.
“We didn’t have a church there then,” she says. “Then, we finally built a church there and everybody began to move their membership to it.”
Virginia Jarrett, 76, moved to Mountain View with her husband in 1955 and helped run his construction business. “The people there were so friendly,” she says. “You felt like the whole church was just a family.”
As in Sunday schools in previous decades, men and women were in separate classes.
“A lot of times, I think there’s things you’d like to discuss that you wouldn’t discuss in a coed class,” Jarrett says. In the Ladies’ Bible Class, she says, “I kind of felt like all of them were sisters to me.”
By the fall of 1980, the women and their families were scattering to about a dozen different churches.In September of that year, the women’s Sunday school class met in Helen, Ga., to talk about how to maintain their friendship. Minutes show that they voted to organize as the Former Mountain View Club, meet monthly, and charge dues of 50 cents a month.
They elected Louise Brown’s husband, Walter, former postmaster of Mountain View, as president of the group.
Some of the original members have been lost to death or distance, and the remaining heads are grayer, but the essential nature of the group remains the same. Each gathering includes celebrations of birthdays, news of health and families, an inspirational reading, prayer and lots of hugs.
“I declare, people had rather miss most anything than that meeting because we look forward to getting together,” says Marjorie Hood, 75, a retired executive secretary who now lives in Riverdale. “I think we’ve done a pretty good job of keeping in touch. It just shows you what kind of community Mountain View was.”
