“He’s coming! He’s coming!” the
neighbors would shout, as the first faint strains of Pastor Wornom’s
voice could be heard over the crest of the hills to the west of
Sunland/Tujunga. The sounds of his horse drawn covered “house”
wagon, and his wife’s exuberant pump organ music
I’ve wandered far away from
God,
Now I’m coming home;
The paths of sin too long I’ve trod,
Lord, I’m coming home.
Coming home, coming home,
Nevermore to roam,
Open wide Thine arms of love,
Lord, I’m coming home. |
accompanied his boisterous rendition
of “Lord I’m Coming Home - Never More To Roam.” The sounds of
laughter, and the coyotes howl echoed throughout the valley,
welcoming the “Old Parson” and “Aunt Jenny” home at last, from a
circuit of preaching.
James T. Wornom was born in Illinois,
the second child of a family of 14, with roots that could be traced
as far back as 1700’s Kentucky. On August 2, 1862, James joined
Company C of the 83rd Infantry to fight the Civil War. His tour of
duty ended in Nashville, Tennessee, on June 26, 1865. Sometime in
the late 1890’s, he married Jennie, who was sixteen years younger
than him. Together, the two were seen traveling in their “house
wagon” throughout Nebraska to the Northwest. They eventually wound
up in California in 1893, singing, and preaching along the way.
|
Pastor
James Wornom |
In 1903, the wheels of the Wornom’s
traveling wagon came to a halt long enough for them to pitch a tent
beneath the thick oaks of the park in the Vale of Monte Vista, now
known as Sunland. The large pasture near the park, a favorite spot
for Saturday night square dancing, would become the home of the Free
Methodist Church, where James T. Wornom would set up pulpit. An
abandoned building that was once the home of the Baptist Church,
became the first permanent Free Methodist.
Services were conducted weekly. James
would ring the bell to entice the flocks to the fold. As the pews
filled, the petite, normally soft-spoken Jennie, would come down the
aisles from the back of the church in resounding voice, her eyes
aimed up to the Lord as she sang. The Parson, a big raw boned,
blustering sort of man, followed behind her, dramatically greeting
her with an embrace as he approached her at the altar.
Jennie taught Bible classes to the
children, and often rewarded them with candy treats for attending.
Wornom lived and breathed religion,
singing it, preaching it, everywhere he went. He felt at his best as
a traveling preacher man, but he also enjoyed spreading physical or
spiritual help to his neighbors and other living creatures.
Weekdays, in his beloved green Verdugo Hills, were spent drawing
fertilizer and leaf mold for neighbors gardens, helping build houses
and cesspools, offering prayer for troubled families, and just being
available to hold a hand or lend it as necessary.
He was also a horse trader, with the
most handsome well kept horses, and had a most mystical ability as a
horse whisperer. Not only did he calm the wildest horse, he also was
noted for his ability to train the community children to ride and
care for horses as well.
In 1913 the neighboring Little Lands
Colony attracted the Wornom’s. The Tujunga Union Gospel Mission
Church was built in 1921 next to their home on North Sunset Avenue
(now Commerce St.) and Los Angeles Street (now Apperson St.). Local
residents and visitors filled the pews of the chapel each Sunday.
Little Lands promoter and developer,
Marshall V. Hartranft was a good friend of James and Jenny. The “Old
Parson” often begged him to set aside land for a burial plot in the
hills that he loved so much. Hartranft would always nod in
agreement, but somehow never got around to actually doing so. In his
80’s, weak and needing to come home to the Lord he had devoted his
life to, James again begged Hartranft one more time, “I’m almost
ready for it, Marsh, have you given my cemetery?” Hartranft waited
till the old man dozed off, then hurried to his office to check his
maps for a suitable site. The following day, Hartranft saw the
Parson for the last time. “I have your cemetery now, Parson it’s all
ready for you. You can check it out any time you want.”
Los Angeles Times, April
24, 1922
PARSON LAID TO
REST IN HILLS
Loved
Character Borne to Last Rest
Sunland Neighbors Bury
Preacher On The Mountain
---------------------------------------
Coffin Carried Up Newly
Made Trail To Grave
-----------------------------------------
Graveyard in a “Roaring
town” Considered Unfit |
“The Parson of the Green
Verdugo hills,” well known by reputation, at least,
through frequent references of him made during past
years in John Steven McGroarty’s page in the Times
Illustrated Magazine, died at his home in Tujunga on Wednesday last and was buried Saturday afternoon.
The funeral was typical of
the man and the place. It was proposed by the neighbors
that the parson being whisked away in a hills that he
loved so well and where he was so much beloved. The
neighbors couldn’t think of the parson be whisked away in
a fancy automobile hearse at forty miles an hour to a
graveyard in a “roaring town.”
So they turned out and
spent three strenuous days making a winding trail to a
high hill at the foot of the Sierra Madres overlooking
the vast sweep of the San Fernando Valley. And upon the
summit of the hill they laid away in sad and solemn
ceremony all that was mortal of their beloved companion.
He sleeps now where he often sat astride his horse
looking across the valley to the Ventura Mountains and
the Calabasas Road.
Funeral Pageant
The funeral was a
picturesque pageant and of a character never witnessed
in these modern times. The body was driven by A. D.
Kirchman in the parson’s old house wagon on which he and
“Aunt Jenny, his life partner, who still survives him,
had made innumerable journeys to camp meetings during
the past twenty years that they have resided in the
Verdugo Hills. The parson’s own horses provided the
motive power.
At the foot of the winding
trail the neighbors took the coffin from the wagon and
bore it on their shoulders to its last resting place
under the glow of the great mountains. A long procession
followed, preceded by a squad of the American Legion,
who fired a parting volley from their rifles over the
grave. Two buglers, one at the grave and another on a
distant hilltop, sounded “Taps.” The parson’s favorite
hymns, “Christ is Walking on the Waters” and “We’ll
Never Say Good-bye in Heaven,” were sung amid the fast
flowing tears of the assemblage. Passages from the
Scripture were read by Rev. j. R. Adams and a funeral
sermon preached by Rev. L. E. Swaney of the Tujunga
Union Gospel Mission.
In life the parson was
James T. Wornom, and after the Civil War in which he
bore himself gallantly as a member of the Eighty-third
Illinois Infantry, he became an itinerant preacher of
the Free Methodist sect. Twenty years ago he located at
Sunland in the Tujunga Valley, where he resided
continuously until the time of his death.
John McGroarty’s Tribute
In the services at the
grave John S. McGroarty was asked to voice the sorrow of
the neighbors I their great loss. He spoke as follows:
“Here now among these
uplifted hills we shall leave all that was mortal of
him. Here shall he sleep until Gabriel winds his horn on
the last Great Day, and the countless and immemorial
dead shall rise again to stand before the Judgment Seat
of God.
“And so, when he awakes it
shall be in no alien place, but on a spot well known of
him and where he was well beloved. His re-envisioned
eyes shall behold again all that which he was so long
familiar--the hills to which he lifted up his eyes and
from which came his strength--the Mother Mountains at
whose feet he prayed on bended knees and to whose high
battlements he flung the challenge of his dauntless
faith. Here where he praised God on winding trails in
the golden dawns and the evening’s purpled dusk, and
when the glory of the stars was upon him in the serene
and quiet night.
Everlasting Hills
“The world may
change, as it will. Times may change and men with them.
New gods may call and beckon and lead the feet of new
generations upon strange pathways. But these great
mountains will not change. As they are now, so shall
they be when the trumpet sounds and the sea is called
back and the heavens rolled and folded as a scroll.
“And God grant that we, his
old friends and neighbors, shall be with him then as we
are now--here among these near, familiar places, to look
our last upon our mountains and just once again before
the Lord God of the Ages crumbles them forever into dust
“between the thunders of His hands.
“That on that last Great
Day we shall greet one another as of old and go hand in
hand, lovingly and good neighbors still, upon the
swinging trails of the winds through the star-dust of
the sky--serene and unafraid to meet the God who made
us, sitting in His golden chair to judge the living and
the dead.” |
Bibliography:
Founding sisters-Life Stories of
Tujunga’s Early Women Pioneers 1886-1926
by Mary Lou Pozzo
Zinnia Press. 2005
The Green Verdugo Hills-A
Chronicle of Sunland-Tujunga And How It Grew
by Mabel Hatch
Little Landers Historical Society
Parson Laid To Rest In Hills
Los Angeles Times, April 24,
1922
Sunland and Tujunga, From Village
To City
by Marlene A. Hitt
Little Landers Historical Society
Arcadia Publishing, 2002
"Lord I’m Coming Home No More To Roam"
by William J. Kirkpatrick
http://www.cyberhymnal.org/htm/l/c/lcomingh.htm
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