In the South, temperatures tend to be warm and people are churchgoers. It's no surprise that paper fans, offering folks a little hand-made breeze on Sundays, have long been fixtures of the region's churches. For Southerners, both white and African-American, these fans are usually found on pews with hymnals and offertory envelopes. They are printed with familiar religious scenes like The Lord's Supper and are a part of the collective memory.
"Church fans were a common visual language among church folks," observes Dr. Charles Reagan Wilson, Director of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. By the 1920s, large batches of fans could be printed inexpensively and were usually provided to churches compliments of a local funeral home as reminders of the availability of their services when they might be needed.
Having the fans provided by funeral homes might be surprising to non-Southerners unaccustomed to having the experience of death and funerals so accepted as part of community life. Dr. Wilson writes, "In the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, southern funerals came to differ from those in the rest of the nation. They were among the region's chief ceremonies. While the American way of death downplayed emotional grief, sentimental Southerners nurtured it."
The Mid-South District provided a contemporary Unitarian Universalist version of the Southern church fan to welcome UUs to GA 2000 in Nashville. On the fan is an image of the Auburn, Alabama Universalist Fellowship building. Formerly the historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, the church was built in 1870 by freed African Americans. After 100 years, Ebenezer Baptist built a new church and sold the old one to the Auburn Heritage Association, which preserved it for the community and eventually sold it to the Auburn Unitarian Universalists in 1981. The interior still shows ample evidence of the woodworking craftsmanship of its builders, including a four-pointed wooden star at the center of the beaded pine ceiling. The image on the paper fans is from an original painting by Auburn UU Janice Koenig Ross.
