Wind, weather make slow going on churchyard wall

Fishermen and Dana Cooper agree on at least one thing. The winter we've just been through and the spring we're in have been one interminably windy stretch.

Fishermen notice the wind because it often keeps their boats sitting at the docks. Dana notices because for the last six months he's been building a brick wall in the middle of an open field.

"It blows every day out here," said Cooper, a master brick and block mason. The field he is working in is at the corner of Plantation and Cedar Grove roads between Lewes and Rehoboth Beach. The brick wall he is building surrounds the graveyard of Ebenezer Methodist Church. The church is long gone, having discontinued services in 1934 and eventually succumbed to the forces of man and nature. An open area without graves in the midst of the tombstones marks where the church once stood.

Hired by officials at Bethel United Methodist Church in Lewes, Cooper has been working his wall-building magic - one brick and one slather of mortar at a time - since late November.

"I should have been done by now," he said. "But that cold, wet winter and the big snow we had set me back. There were days my son and I would be bundled up in four and five layers trying to cut the wind. Out here there's no place to get away from it, and it seemed like every day it would start out of the southwest but by noon swing around to the northeast. We were always fighting it."

Readers may recall that this March brought us four northeast storms, and early April at least one more.

This church wall is the third of Cooper's 35-year masonry career. "I really like doing them and wouldn't mind doing one every four or five years or so. They're nice straight runs, and I get a lot of satisfaction out of them."

His first was the wall along Bethel Methodist Cemetery on Savannah Road in Lewes. Then, a few years later, St. John's United Methodist Church parishioner Idella Pettyjohn commissioned Cooper to build a perimeter brick wall around the church and cemetery at Springfield Crossroads. The church stands catty-cornered to Jimmy Wilson's Store along Route 30.

Doing this kind of work, Cooper gets to talk to a lot of graveyard visitors and church members. "They're all so nice."

According to Frank Zebley's 1947 book called Churches of Delaware, the first Ebenezer Methodist Church was built in the late 1700s in the area of Lewes known commonly as Quakertown, where the headwaters of Canary Creek cross Savannah Road. The building that once stood alongside its historic cemetery has also gone with the passage of time.

A new Ebenezer Methodist Church, according to Zebley, was built on the Cedar Grove Road property, donated by Abba Wolfe. It was dedicated in January 1858 and went through several renovations in 1886, 1901 and 1920. William Blizzard donated property around the church for the cemetery that Cooper is now adding a level of permanence to with the brick wall nearing completion. He also plans to resurrect several tombstones that have fallen for various reasons.

Early this week, Cooper was in the home stretch. The day was Tuesday, hot, and windy of course, the mortar drying quickly. "I'll take this," he said. "I can sail along in this weather." He was installing angled capping bricks to the top of the wall; they're angled to shed water from the agricultural irrigation system in the fields surrounding the churchyard.

"These slowed me too," he said. "I wasn't planning on the angled cap, but the irrigation water became a worry. I had to cut about 5,000 of these bricks to complete the angled cap. One by one."

When all is said and done on the Ebenezer project, Cooper figures he'll have laid about 27,000 bricks. "This was a much smaller project than Bethel and St. John's, but I didn't have to deal with the kind of weather on them that I've contended with on this one."

In his spare time, Cooper swaps his trowel for a golf club. A scratch player, many tournament trophies attest to his prowess on courses all over the Delmarva Peninsula.

Don't be worrying that his grip, or his determination, will be weakening any time soon.