Just Like Nothing (else) on Earth: Ketoctin Church and Cemetery

By Tim Jon

Brooding, that’s it: given the hypothetical challenge of coming up with a single word description of today’s subject matter, I could do far worse than this—but as you know, there’ll be much more. 

The somber visual presentation of an historic brick building, virtually surrounded by ancient headstones, mature (mostly leafless) trees, and a damp lawn carpeting a still and silent landscape, coupled with a grey overcast sky that melded into a low ground fog—all this left me feeling that time, and even space meant little here, that I’d stepped out of our 21st Century vortex of overcrowded hurry, and into a portion of the universe that held scant need for chronology or physical apportionment. 

“C’mon, Tim Jon—what’s in your coffee this morning?” Okay, I’ll admit, all this is perhaps a stretch for the reader’s imagination, coming from one who’s lived in Loudoun County going on three decades, and as familiar with our current hustle and bustle lifestyle as most other local residents. 

Still, I was there—at that intersection of dimensions out in the relatively uncrowded, western expanse reaching as far as the Blue Ridge, and that heady description is certainly the encapsulation of my experience. 

Let’s start with how the discoveries unfolded: I was initially surprised at just how expansive the grounds around the old Ketoctin Church appeared. I was prepared for an historic, rural house of worship as the centerpiece, of course, and the corresponding cemetery of much more modest means about the place—but this—the graveyard seemed to reach almost out to the horizon, an effect aided by darkened skies and mist that gave me the sense of enveloping the grounds in a blanket of heavenly material. 

Now, my cursory knowledge of the site, I’m sure, also added to my imagination’s free-ranging rendering of the morning’s events: the congregation of Ketoctin formed prior to the American Revolution—way back in 1751, according to a quick bit of research. 

Now, the current Church facility at the site is a comparative fledgling, having been constructed in 1854, after at least one earlier structure fell to the hands of time; I had to remind myself the present-day building pre-dates the Civil War. 

So, that’s some history; not quite eternity, but about as close as I can reach from the well of evidence of our so-called modern civilization in these parts. In fact, an unhurried stroll through the surrounding churchyard reveals headstones etched up to the memories of soldiers who served in several historic military conflicts: not only the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, but the War of 1812 as well. 

Now, just for a point of reference, we can compare these relatively recent chicken-scratchings of some of the early settling in the locality to the much more impressive history of the region’s geologic events: most eyebrows, I trust, will rise a bit at the reminder of the age of those hills rising to the west—the Blue Ridge Mountains, part of the Appalachian Range—having formed hundreds of millions to upwards of a billion years ago. Even the advent of the earliest Americans —erroneously called ‘Indians’ by some of the later ‘outside’ explorers—dates from drastically more recent times, evidence suggesting the 20-thousand-year range. 

No, I didn’t peruse all the dates and factual information of these lengthy timelines as I slowly paced around the grounds of Ketoctin Church and its cemetery that gloomy morning, but some of the seeds were planted—in the back of the mind, at the end of some of the hairs on my head, and perhaps along the spinal column, the part that remains partial to a shivering sensation whenever one feels the presence of the immortal, or eternal. 

Being in the vicinity of that much time and space, the dimensions seemed, if only for a moment, to become irrelevant, perhaps intersecting all at one point, with mutual cancellation, like magnets repelling one another. 

Simply: it’s an old house of worship, surrounded by ancient markers of its members reaching far afield, in the shadow of even more ancient physical features, all previously trodden by at least what we believe was the original race of humans in this region, and country, and hemisphere. 

See what I mean by the back of the mind, the hairs on one’s head, and the sensitive portion of the spinal column? This is what spoke to me from that visit to the site along Ketoctin Church Road, just off Allder School Road, a few miles north of the Town of Purcellville, Virginia. 

And, you know what? Writing this story, I lost track of the time. Now, see—that was some good coffee!