For historic Mississippi church, a day of Thanksgiving

It’s a sleepy Sunday morning in Greenwood, Mississippi, and though it’s almost noon, Grand Boulevard’s antebellum homes stand in stately silence, not a soul stirring, not a leaf out of place on the manicured lawns. This is the postcard-perfect South, the oak-canopied, four-lane stretch of highway that the Garden Club of America called one of the most beautiful streets in the nation, the street so frozen in time that the DreamWorks film crew used it as the setting for Hilly Holbrook’s house in “The Help.”

At the edge of the...