By Jeremy Peppas
Stephens Media

CATO — Far off the beaten path, at the dead end of a dirt road, Cato United Methodist Church stands as a picturesque window to the past.

The church was established in this tiny rural hamlet in northern Pulaski County in 1872 as a Methodist Episcopal church. The current structure is 129 years old and listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

No one has attended the old church on a regular basis in nearly a half-century; declining in numbers, parishioners closed the doors to Cato United Methodist in 1962 after 90 years.

The cemetery on the grounds is still in use, and the church itself will be bustling today when hundreds of former parishioners from around the state make their yearly trek back in time for the church’s homecoming celebration.

“It is always on the first Sunday in June, and we have a Decoration Day as well for the cemetery,” said Bill Burgin, who attended the church and serves as chairman of the trustees, a group of former parishioners who maintain the church and property.

Decoration Day is a Southern tradition of decorating the graves of dead relatives.

“We’ve had as many as 300 people before,” Burgin said. “I think we’ll have at least 200 this time, those who attended the church like myself. Everyone who can will try to make it.”

Burgin recalled the aftermath of the church’s closing.

“For a long time Cato was just a ghost town,” he said. “Cato was an old town, established before Conway but the railroad passed it by and the highways passed it by and when Camp Robinson took the land in 1940 for the war, the church, the school all declined,” Burgin said. “The church hung on to 1962 but they combined it with the United Methodist Church at Bethel.”

Methodist church closings around rural Arkansas was not an uncommon occurrence, said Marsha Crossman, a Conway-based archivist with the Arkansas United Methodist Conference.

“We’ve had many, many churches over the years close,” she said. “We’ve had many churches consolidate.”

The church at Cato started as a circuit rider church.

“We were one of five. It was the head church for that circuit. So it was Bethel and Cato and a couple more in what is now Camp Robinson,” Burgin said.

“It was after the Civil War that the [Methodist] movement came to Arkansas,” Crossman added. “It was the circuit rider who really carried the Methodist church in the wild. A circuit rider may have had as many as 20 places they stopped at and they left behind a lot of local churches.”

To celebrate its circuit-riding legacy, the Cato church has a stained glass window in which a Methodist pastor on horseback is etched.

The Cato church did not start as a United Methodist church.

“It was Frenchman Mountain Methodist Episcopal Church-South,” Burgin said. “This whole area was known as Frenchman Mountain, but it was changed to Cato when they applied for a post office.”

Burgin’s family had a direct involvement in the choice of the name.

“Cato was named after my grandmother’s family,” he said. “Her mother was named Cato and they moved to Arkansas in 1802.”

Burgin himself was born and grew up within a stone’s throw from the church, “now considered a shrine to all who worshiped there or whose families are buried in the cemetery,” he said.

“We maintain (the church and grounds) with donations, and the homecoming has been held annually for over 100 years,” he said.

The agenda for today’s celebration include a cemetery report at 10:30 a.m., followed by worship service at 11. Potluck dinner will be served at 12:30 p.m.

The church also has a Christmas celebration on the last Saturday night before Christmas Eve. Last year’s was Dec. 20.