Roller-McNutt Funeral Home

Rick Henry of Conway is on a mission to save the church.“It goes way, way back. My mother said there hasn’t been a congregation there in 60 to 65 years,” Henry said. “It’s an orphan church. No one owns it.”Henry, a preplanning consultant for Roller-McNutt Funeral Home, grew up in Mount Vernon, where his 81-year-old mother, Rheba Henry, still lives.“The previous church was a little white wooden church with a tin roof and wooden pews. That church stood for years and years,” he said.Rick Henry said a relative, Maude Henry, paid for the current church to be built decades ago with the best of intentions.“In her mind, she thought being that it was a little white wooden church that had been there 100 years as a church and a little school, that it probably would not stand forever,” he said.Hawthicket Church, which Henry describes as “the little brown church in the vale,” was constructed of brick and has a shingle roof.However, Henry said, by the time Maude Henry financed the replacement church, most of the church’s members were buried in the Bethlehem Cemetery on the property.“To my knowledge, there was never a service held in that church,” Henry said. “She built a defunct church.”Although it wasn’t reflected in the name, Henry said, Hawthicket was a Methodist church.After another rainstorm, he peered through the windows to look inside the church.“Now part of the ceiling has given way in the church,” he said. Henry wants to find an individual, group, organization or grant to help “at least repair the roof before it caves in.”Henry’s father and grandparents attended the old wooden church, and they and many of Rick Henry’s relatives, including Maude Henry, are buried in the adjacent cemetery.Rick Henry, who visits his brother’s grave in the cemetery, has watched the church deteriorate over the years.“The roof has a huge hole in it,” he said, adding that it gets bigger with every storm that blows through the county.A deed shows that the Maude Henry Trust, established in the early 1970s, o...