Prison Inmates Create a Garden on Church Grounds
Diocesan Press Service. October 20, 1975 [75366]
Lydia Dorsett
KISSIMMEE, Fla. -- God Almighty planted the first garden, and sometime later St. John's Episcopal Church in Kissimmee, Florida planted another.
There was physical hunger and spiritual hunger in Kissimmee. The people at St. John's considered the hunger, and then they considered a field which belonged to the parish and which was lying idle.
They offered the use of the field to the Citizen's Volunteer Committee for Community Relations between the town and the Kissimmee Correctional Center.
The Committee planned a vegetable garden, and inmates at the Correctional Center volunteered to work there as their project for the community.
George and Becky Beckwith of St. John's worked with the inmates as they planted and cultivated the garden. The Thursday morning prayer group at the church cooked a full course dinner for the workers, and hungry people around the church were invited to join them. The rector, Fr. Francis Baltz, his secretary, the senior warden, the sexton, and others joined in the fellowship.
The garden was a late summer planting, and the crop was not plentiful. But it supplied cucumbers, green peppers, tomatoes, squash, eggplant, blackeyed peas, and some corn. Five families were sustained by the produce.
But George Beckwith says that the greatest harvest was in the hearts of the inmates who labored there.