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St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Lee Enterprises

Tuesday, August 5, 2008 11:11 PM CDT
Cooks Mills church anniversary turns into town-wide celebration

By HERB MEEKER, Staff Writer
hmeeker@jg-tc.com

COOKS MILLS — God does work in mysterious ways in this village.

Two months ago, storms and floods postponed most of the events recognizing the 150th anniversary of Pleasant Grove Baptist Church at Cooks Mills in the northwest corner of the county. So the congregation decided to postpone the event to August when the threat of rain was less daunting.

In the meantime, a parade was added and organizers got excited as more area participants joined in.

“Now we are worried we might not have enough food for everyone coming,” said the Rev. Stephanie Johanpeter with a laugh. “What has been so much fun about this is the electricity it has created.”

There are more than 30 entries already for the parade through Cooks Mills, starting on the east side and going over the Kaskaskia River bridge to Pleasant Grove Church. The parade starts at 10 a.m. Saturday. Rosalind Hood, a 93-year-old church member and former organist and Bible school teacher, will be parade marshal.

Though it will include fire trucks from Cooks Mills Fire Protection District, the parade will not include a four-legged favorite from the community’s past.

“When we started talking about a parade some longtime church members remembered Judy the Horse. She was a farm horse and the children loved to put ribbons on her knees and in her tail before the parade. She used to pull a wagon with the school children in the parades,” said Johanpeter, who is called “Pastor Jo.”

After crossing the river, the celebration will continue with a blessing and the filling of hot dog buns and ice cream bowls. It will draw people from sister churches and from the general area of Cooks Mills, named after a pair of grist mills in the 1800s once owned by a man named Cooks.

“We all agreed we wanted to do something for the people of Cooks Mills. This is really a celebration of life here,” Johanpeter said.

The church was truly about fellowship from the beginning, members said. The first services shifted among cabins of several church members before a church was built after the Civil War. The current structure dates back to 1896. A basement and addition were added decades prior to the centennial of the church.

The nearby river came in handy for the Baptists. Johanpeter has a newspaper clipping showing a wintry baptismal service more than a century ago near the bridge by Pleasant Grove.

“You can see the ice there!” she said.

The only concerns about ice on Saturday might be keeping the soft drinks and ice cream iced down.

Contact Herb Meeker at hmeeker@jg-tc.com or 238-6869.

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Pleasant Grove Baptist Church in Cooks Mills, Illinois on Tuesday, August 5, 2008. (Jay Grabiec/Staff Photographer)