Photo by Jessica Stewart / St. Joseph News-Press / Purchase this photo

Mackintyre's grandfather Mackintyre McDill and his father Glen Garton work on Mackintyre's church.

The cross is rugged and tall, stretching 22 feet toward the sky.

It went up Sept. 21, exactly one month after Mackintyre Kindol McDill-Garton’s 9th birthday. And it was the perfect gift.

Never mind that Mackintyre has an entire farm full of toys, including some — like the 1992 Saturn he’s not allowed to drive beyond his front yard — that he hasn’t quite grown into. He has a four-wheeler just his size and a dolly to pull behind it. He has a cabin he wired himself with electricity and cable. He has an old tractor waiting for winter, when his dad and grandpa will restore it with him.

Or at least that was the plan until about a week before the cross went up — until Sept. 12, when Mackintyre woke with a headache and died minutes later.

Now, the 88 acres near Lathrop, Mo., that houses his parents’ and grandparents’ homes is painfully empty. It’s void of the activity of the boy who never stopped moving. The inside of his cabin remains partially unpainted, and his basketball goal and hockey table and lawn mower sit unused. His horses stand still.

But in the midst of this stillness, up a hill from his parents’ house and with a clear view of his grandpa’s barn, is the cross. It’s the beginning of the church Mackintyre had wanted to build since he was 6 — one he had insisted on so much that his mom knew, as she sat in the hospital the day he died, had to be built.

Stacey Garton and her husband, Glen, sat with Mackintyre’s body almost four hours that day. He’d been gone by the time the ambulance arrived to speed him to the hospital, taken by an aneurism just minutes before he should have gotten on the school bus instead. After efforts to revive him at the hospital ended, his mom held him like she had when he was a 5-pound baby, born prematurely after a difficult pregnancy. She’d had to undergo a year of fertility treatments to have him at all, and now, it was impossible to comprehend not having him anymore.

Mackintyre Kindol McDill-Garton

“I couldn’t imagine leaving him, because we never left him anywhere. He never wanted to leave the farm,” she says. “So I told him, ‘We’re going to build your church, and we’re going to bury you there.’”

A church, of course, is not a typical wish for a 9-year-old — even for those who love their churches as much as Mackintyre loved Holt United Methodist Church, where his family has gone since he was little.

But Mackintyre wasn’t typical. By 2, he’d so mastered the use of his cordless drill that his mom came home to find a pile of doorknobs on the floor. Last summer, he turned down going to Disney World to instead go to an old, historic cabin in a remote part of Arkansas. And always, he had a love for people and for old-time things. He’d choose a lantern over a flashlight any day, and he seemed to have a soul more suited to an 80-year-old.

Maybe this was why some of his best friends were old enough to be his grandparents — and why his grandparents were some of his best friends.

“He kept us young. He kept us out of rocking chairs,” says his grandmother, Nancy McDill. “If the Lord had put a tag on his little toe and said ‘You’ll have him this long,’ we’d have said, ‘Send him on.’ We wouldn’t have wanted to miss a moment of those wonderful years.”

During those years were lots of discussions about the church he wanted. He would point out the location for it when he and his grandma rode four-wheelers together, and he would ask his grandpa about once a month when they were going to start building.

Photo by Jessica Stewart / St. Joseph News-Press / Purchase this photo

Mackintyre's grandmother Nancy McDill built a model of Mackintyre's church, complete with pastor parking and a sign in the boy's hand writing.

“I kept putting him off, and I didn’t have any inkling we’d build anything more than a play church,” says his grandfather, Mackintyre McDill. “But then he left without the chance to inherit his portion of the farm, and I couldn’t think of anything better than to build his church out here.”

His church, now partially constructed, is a one-room structure that measures 24 feet by 36 feet. It will have high ceilings and a bright red roof, as well as an old church bell that Mackintyre had begged for and that he’d happily hung outside his cabin after his dad finally found it for him.

The bell was only the beginning of the contributions Mackintyre made to the building; the entire structure is being modeled after a birdhouse-sized church he built with his grandma just days before he died. And on the inside, his family plans to put the kind of vintage items he would have loved: old pews, old hymnals and old Bibles.

Although no congregation will meet there regularly, Mackintyre’s Church will be open to anyone at any time. It will be a place where his friends will come to play the bluegrass music he always loved. And it is where his cremated remains have been laid to rest in the fireproof, waterproof combination lock box he’d asked for and received on his birthday, just weeks before his death.

“He told me, ‘It’s important to have these, because it’s where you put your most precious things,’” his mother remembers.

Two days before he died, Mackintyre began filling the box with a compass, keys and his mom’s battery-powered screwdriver; with casings from the 21-gun salute at a friend’s funeral, a barometer from a man at church and his own wallet, which held $54, photos and a driver’s license he’d made in case he ever got stopped while driving in his front yard.

On Oct. 19, friends and family gathered for a dedication of Mackintyre’s Church and a celebration of his life. Some added notes and other treasures to the lock box where he’d stowed away his, and there was bluegrass music and food and fellowship — all things he’d loved.

Mackintyre’s remains and his treasures were buried that afternoon beneath the cross that stands tall beside the frame of his church. Perhaps fittingly, the only place in the Gartons’ home that offers a clear view of the cross is Mackintyre’s room.

“He wanted this church for a reason,” Mrs. Garton says. “I don’t know what that was or who it was for, but hopefully someone who needs it will find it. And we hope it will be a place that will bring joy and peace to people. That’s what Mackie would have wanted.”

Lifestyles reporter Erin Wisdom can be reached at

ewisdom@npgco.com.

For more information about Mackintyre McDill-Garton and Mackintyre’s Church, go to www.mackintyreschurch.com.