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Pine Hill Church Celebrates Legacies

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By CHRISTIAN M. WADE, The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 22, 2008

PORT RICHEY - The church is small, a few dozen aging wooden pews, brick and stucco walls, a cramped fellowship hall next to the sanctuary, and a modest steeple with bells.

But for nearly a half-century, the Union Missionary Baptist Church has been the center of life in the Pine Hill neighborhood, west Pasco County's tightly knit black community.

The church was built in the early 1930s by about two dozen black families who migrated here from Georgia, but the roots of its congregation date back more than a century.

On Monday, as residents gathered to pay tribune to the life and work of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., the legacy of those families who built it echoed through the tiny sanctuary.

Dolly Iverson talked about how the church had been established only a few decades after the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation was signed by President Lincoln. "The founders of this great church were barely free," she said.

One of the early congregants is Laura Burch, 95, whose father and brothers built the church. She was honored at the event for her contributions to the Pine Hill community. "Mother Burch has always been here for the church and her community," Iverson said.

It was the first time that the annual celebrations have been held in Pine Hill. Organizers of the event, which had for several years been held in Sims Park in downtown New Port Richey, decided this year the time had come to return to the old neighborhood.

"We made history today," said Pastor Ronald Smart, a Brooklyn native who took over the church's small congregation nearly a decade ago. "We've never done this here before."

Pine Hill has changed much over the years. Many of the original families have moved away, the housing stock is decaying and the neighborhood has been struggling to shake its old reputation as a haven for drug dealers and gang activity in the west Pasco area.

Congregants prayed, raised their hands towards the heavens and sang gospels. The event coincided with speeches, parades and memorial services across the Tampa Bay area, state and nation honoring King, whose struggle for civil rights came to a devastating end in 1968, when he was assassinated on a Memphis, Tenn., motel balcony.

James Vincent Price, a circuit county judge from Pinellas County, talked about King's message of equality and brotherhood and his contribution to the civil rights struggle.

"He gave his life for the equality and freedom of all of us," he said.

Reporter Christian M. Wade can be reached at (727) 815-1082 or cwade@tampatrib.com.

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