Blessed With History

Father-to-Be Preserves His Heritage With Fifth-Generation Christening at Chapel

If all goes as planned, Chris Dumond's newborn daughter will be christened in January in the little white chapel at Sydenstricker United Methodist Church in Springfield.

It will be a ceremony deep with meaning. Dumond's great-great-great grandfather John Quincy Hall was a founding member of the church. Four generations of his family have been christened there, including his great-grandmother Clara Hall, for whom the baby -- due on Christmas -- will be named.

It is more than a family connection that will make the event special. Before it was carved into cul-de-sacs and sliced up by highways, Springfield was rolling farmland. It's also as close to an ancestral homeland as it gets for Dumond, 29, who can trace his roots to the area back seven generations.

While the region has transformed around him and his family, the little white chapel has remained largely unchanged since it was built nearly 100 years ago. It is a source of solace to him and his family that his daughter can be christened there, Dumond said.

"It's kind of hard to go back now and see the way it is," said Dumond, a journalist who lives in Bedford, Va. "Everything's paved over. Every time I go up there, it's more and more sprawl and less and less what I remember. . . . I'm just glad there's something left that my daughter can have a connection to."

Sydenstricker United Methodist Church was founded by merchants and farmers in 1909 on land donated by Caleb Hall, a relative of John Quincy Hall's, said Marc Points, the church's historian. Two years later, the community built the wood and stone structure by hand.

When it opened, about 44 people worshiped there. The church was led by the Rev. Christopher Sydenstricker, an uncle of novelist Pearl S. Buck's, who was best known for her depiction of Chinese village life in "The Good Earth."

Today, the church has about 900 people members. It celebrates its 100th anniversary next year. A Saturday evening service still takes place in the white chapel, as it is called, but most church activities are in a large modern building on the grounds.

Points said the tiny chapel reminds him of the churches he used to visit Sunday mornings with his grandfather, a roving Methodist minister, and his grandmother, who would play piano while churchgoers sang hymns.

The chapel has changed a little over the years, he said. The stone steps have been replaced with concrete ones. In 1952, the church was renovated and expanded, and the delicate stained-glass windows behind the pulpit were removed. Still, the church retains the characteristics that remind him of the Methodist churches his family would visit throughout southern Fairfax and northern Prince William counties.

"It feels like home in kind of a nostalgic way, something in the past that we've lost," said Points, 37, a senior program analyst for the National Weather Service. "A more innocent time."

Dumond's personal history doesn't date to Springfield's farming days. He grew up in the 1980s and 1990s in subdivisions in Springfield and Sterling. At the time, the region's population was booming and Northern Virginia was evolving from rolling farmland into the state's economic engine.

Even then, the community had retained some of its out-of-the way charm. Dumond recalls playing in the woods and picking wild blackberries with his friends. That quiet suburban feel has been lost, and at such a pace that it is dizzying, Dumond said.

Dumond said he understands that change is inevitable and that Springfield has a new identity. Still, he said, its transformation seemingly overnight into a traffic-choked urban area has been difficult to watch because he feels his heritage has been buried with the landscape.

He is of Scotch-Irish and Pennsylvania Dutch heritage but feels much more connected to Virginia. His relatives have traced, through family Bibles, their family history to the early 1800s but think the family's presence in the United States dates to before the Revolutionary War.

When he and his wife, Jessie, 26, found out they were expecting, it did not take long for them to decide the baby would be christened at the chapel that embodies that history and culture.

"It suddenly clicked," he said.

Because they had decided to name the baby Clara, he said, "we thought it would be a nice thing to do in that church because that church was so important to my great-grandmother's life. It was kind of a no-brainer."