JELLOWAY — Most Knox Countians know of Dutch Hill, south of the village of Jelloway on Ohio 3. What they may not know is how it got its name.
The folks at Zion Lutheran Church, set atop Dutch Hill, speculate that Dutch is an Americanization of Deutsche, the German word for the language spoken by the German farmers who immigrated to that part of Knox County long ago.
Zion is the oldest Lutheran church in the county, founded in 1837 as the German Evangelical and Reformed Zions Congregation. The current building of brick and stone was dedicated June 12, 1927. The March 1940 issue of the weekly Columbus-based Lutheran Standard newsletter reported on the church: “The holy hill of Zion was a sacred place to the people of Israel. Similarly, Lutherans in Knox County, Ohio, have revered the location of their church, high and lifted up.”
The early congregation met in members’ homes, and conducted worship services in German, until a log church was constructed on the hill in the late 1850s. It was replaced by a frame building a few years later and, during the 1874 to 1880 pastorate of the Rev. E.A. Born, a Sunday afternoon service in English was added. Later, the morning German service was immediately followed by an English service; in 1893, German services were dropped. In 1857, the church was renamed the Evangelical Lutheran Zion’s Congregation.
Late one Saturday night, or very early on Sunday morning, in the winter of 1926, the frame church burned down — before the new pastor, the Rev. Harry Truxall, could preach his first sermon. Despite its prominence on the hill, the fire was unnoticed by anyone. The members arrived on Sunday morning to find their building a pile of smoldering ashes. But they were eager to continue, and replaced the building with the current structure, much of its construction accomplished by the members.
“I was living when this church was built,” said the congregation’s matriarch, Mary Frank, who will be 92 in March.
She recalled that for years, the men sat on the left side of the sanctuary, and the women sat on the right, and that a lighted 10-foot cross, for Lent, and a 7-foot star, for Advent, were affixed to the bell tower.
“As soon as people saw that light, at night when they were driving, they knew where they were,” she said.
Frank also remembers when Ohio 3 was paved with brick, and that for years there was no church parking lot; members parked their cars along the highway.
“There wasn’t the traffic there is today,” she said.
The large stained-glass sanctuary windows are “priceless,” said Charlotte Frank, Mary’s sister-in-law. Designed in 1926 by Truxall, they tell the Gospel story with a multitude of colorful Christian symbols. Charlotte said the windows were examined by a professional stained-glass artist, who noted they were made with a “speckling” technique that is no longer used. The rose window over the altar represents the coming of the Holy Spirit, and in the back of the sanctuary stands the figure of Jesus, made of and framed in brightly colored glass.
Church member Art Eddy took visitors, including the current pastor, the Rev. Beje Wiegman, to the base of the bell tower. He led a climb to the top of a large built-in cupboard to reach the trap door in the ceiling, placed a Fiberglas ladder in the opening and boosted visitors to their feet beside the huge bell dusted with snow.
Through the louvers built into each side of the tower, the view from Dutch Hill is marvelous in all directions, including a look down on the old graveyard beside the church.
The bell is inscribed “No. 44” and “American Bell Foundry, Northville, Michigan USA.” It is still rung fairly often by the long rope in the tower’s base, especially by small children who enjoy “riding” the rope when the big bell in its rotary yoke completes its arc upward, then — compelled by gravity — falls.
The remains of a wooden ladder clung to the tower wall, leading to another trap door that accesses the roof. Unfortunately, it’s not climbable; lifting oneself up through the trap door from the too-short Fiberglas ladder would require the upper-body strength of a professional weightlifter. Instead, Eddy stood on the top of the ladder, tipped up the trap door with one hand and held a camera high over his head to take a photo of the view toward Howard.
Truxall wrote an early history of the church, amended later by Mary Frank and, later still, by Bobbie Rawson. In it, Frank wrote, “We have been told, and we feel it is true, that we have the most beautiful site in the Ohio District for our church home.”
The Knox County On High series will continue on Monday, Feb. 11, with an exploration of the four-story Dowds-Snyder Funeral Home in Mount Vernon.
