FALL 2003
n Saturday, May 3, 2003, a memorial service was held at the Lower Alloways Creek Meetinghouse in Hancock’s Bridge. The gathering was a unique mixture of the old and the new. People in their best modern dress, arriving in posh automobiles, assembled in an ancient meetinghouse, unaltered by the passage of time. In a powerful sense, the occasion was in itself such a mixture. The memorial meeting for worship was a time to celebrate, honor, and mourn the passing of Harold Powell, himself a powerful mixture of the modern and the eternal.
In his youth, Harold Powell was a long-time resident of the area around Hancock’s Bridge. Many of his childhood memories included attending the meeting there. In his lifetime, Harold Powell rose to build a large, powerful, and complex company that employed numerous workers and whose products enormously contributed to the material benefit of society. For his work, he was honored by Mayor Edward Rendell of Philadelphia. But his material successes did not blur his vision of those things that are eternal in our lives. He never lost sight of his workers as individuals, with personal needs and dreams, and families, and aspirations.
Nor did he lose sight of his roots. At the end of his life he contacted the Trustees of Salem Quarterly Meeting and presented them an endowment sufficient to improve and maintain the meetinghouse and grounds in perpetuity. Indeed, the recent significant improvements to the meetinghouse were a direct result of that generous financial contribution. On a beautiful spring day several years ago, Harold, along with his family, took some of the Trustees out to lunch. There we reminisced about the meetinghouse and Hancock’s Bridge of his youth. We visited the Meetinghouse, the Old Cemetery, and, finally, the Harmersville Cemetery. It was there that he showed us the grave of his father and mother. “I want to be buried near my mother and father,” he told us. It is with great depth of meaning that we, today, have honored that request.
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Wednesday, February 18, 2004 at 08:19 AM
