PITTSBORO — On Saturday, February 29 — a Leap Day in this Leap Year 2020 — Moleta Waddell will officially celebrate her 100th birthday.
Friends and family gathered with the soon-to-be-centenarian following the 11 a.m. service last Sunday at St. Bartholomew’s Church for an early observance. Seated at a table in the church’s dining hall — a cake with “Happy 100th Birthday Moleta” inscribed in buttercream icing, and a stack of napkins with “100” printed on them, before her — Waddell was serenaded by her church family with a lively rendition of the “Happy Birthday” song, concluding the tune with “May the Good Lord bless you.”
Waddell is the oldest of the Pittsboro church’s approximately 160 communicants; she’s also the last living link to St. James Episcopal Chapel, an offshoot of St. Bartholomew’s built post-Civil War about a block away from St. Bartholomew’s at the site of the present location of Pittsboro United Methodist Church’s parking lot, on West Street.
St. James exists no more, but for decades it was an important part of church life in Pittsboro, for a segment of the town’s populace.
“In 1833, a small group of white Episcopalians came together in Pittsboro, North Carolina, to consecrate St. Bartholomew’s Church,” according to a 2012 honors thesis written by Virginia Thomas about the church and its African-American offshoot, as part of Thomas’ work through the American Studies Department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Prior to the Civil War, many white members of the church brought slaves to services and baptized them into the church; they sat, according Thomas’ thesis, in the “slave gallery” in the balcony of St. Bartholomew’s.
In 1879, “in keeping with efforts by other Episcopal Churches in North Carolina to segregate their churches, a prominent white member of St. Bartholomew’s proposed that the parish build a mission for the now free blacks who had attended the Church as slaves of white members.”
St. James Episcopal Chapel was soon established.
A cornerstone of the black community, the black church began a Sunday school and parochial school for black children and for several decades the church fulfilled an important role.
With the eventual end of the Jim Crow era later in the 20th century, “black Episcopalians were invited to return to the mother church, as it was, and lots of folks did,” said Al Capehart, one of St. Bartholomew’s communicants.
And one of those folks was Moleta Waddell, who became a member of St. James 92 years ago, at the age of 8. Waddell in 1968 joined the “mother church,” St. Bartholomew’s on West Salisbury Street, a block away from the black offshoot church.
Somewhere around that time, St. James was burned — intentionally, for volunteer fire department personnel training — leaving no remaining trace of the old structure today.
Waddell is the last living link to St. James’ and St. Bartholomew’s historic past.
“It’s just amazing and wonderful that she’s here with us and we’re able to celebrate that part of our church’s history through her,” Capehart said.
Waddell was one of seven children, all of her siblings now deceased, including a sister who lived to the age of 104.
Church has long been important to her and she continues to be an active member of St. Bartholomew’s as she approaches her 100th year.
“She reads her Bible every day,” said church member, and Waddell’s friend, Carolyn Townsend. “Church is a real significant part of her life.”
Waddell still lives at home, said Townsend, who routinely stops at McDonald’s to pick up Waddell’s “favorite take-away meal, Chicken McNuggets,” when she visits.
“She takes good care of herself,” Townsend said.
Dressed in a bright red jacket, a pink ribbon and rose pinned to it over her heart, Waddell made her way with the help of a cane into the dining hall after Sunday service, where she took a seat of honor at the head of a table.
Her sons, Wayne Freeman and Rudolph Kirby, accompanied her and joined in the singing of “Happy Birthday,” after which Waddell sliced the first piece of cake.
A wide smile breaking on her face, Waddell appeared moved by the warm attention.
“Thank you,” she said. “Thank you all so much.”
Waddell, born during a Leap Year, has an actual birthday — meaning a birthday that falls on the 29th of February — only every four years, noted Anna Deese, the church’s sexton, though she prefers the title of church “nana.”
“She’s actually only 25,” Deese joked.
Randall Rigsbee can be reached at rigsbee@chathamnr.com.