Bob Childress was on a mission from God.
Robert Walter Childress, born in 1890 in a remote area of Southwest Virginia near Ararat, deplored what he saw in his neighbors while he was growing up, thinking them to be untamed, uneducated and violent country people. After a brief career in law enforcement, he dedicated his life’s work to conveying civility through spirituality.
During his 30 years of ministry, six Presbyterian churches made with field stones were constructed under his guidance in the Buffalo Mountain area where Floyd, Patrick and Carroll counties converge. His efforts were widely lauded for bringing education, civility and economic development — and of course godliness — to the area, so pervasive that a 1970 book was written about him, “The Man Who Moved A Mountain,” ensuring his legacy in the region and the ministry.
These churches made an irresistible destination for my friend Nick Piazza and me on a crystalline late August day.
In Floyd, we gassed up the bikes — his Harley-Davidson and my Honda — and synched up our wireless communicators. Nick set his GPS toward Rock Castle Gap. Nick had charted a roughly 100-mile circular route for us, and he guided our way, steering his lumbering Harley through the curvy, sparse back roads.
Our first visit was to the Slate Mountain Presbyterian Church, just off the Blue Ridge Parkway near the Chateau Morrisette winery and the often-photographed Mabry Mill. According to the cornerstone, the church was built in 1932. The exterior stones were white-tan-brown, set raggedly in mortar, framing stained glass window panels. There was no spire for a steeple. Instead a square-section tower leaped above the front door. The setting was peaceful and beautiful, with a view of a neighboring pasture and pond. A buzzard sat on a fencepost, scrutinizing our visit, and two deer munched grass.
Back on the bikes, we made our next stop at the Mayberry Presbyterian Church, in the real Virginia community from which the Andy Griffith Show’s fictional Mayberry was named, a stone’s throw from the parkway. It was a simple, rectangular building, clad in the same type of natural quartz and quartzite stone, but boasting a towering, cross-topped white spire, the only Childress church with a tall spire. Built in 1925 as a one-story frame church, it had its rock facing added in 1948.
A brief run on more unmarked roads took us to our third church, the Buffalo Mountain Presbyterian Church and cemetery, straddling the Carroll-Floyd county line, which was Reverend Childress’ home church and his final resting place.
Buffalo Mountain — so named because of its hump is monolithically shaped like a buffalo — or more accurately a bison since no true buffalo species exist in America. The peak’s unusual and distinctive shape dominates the nearby mountains. The top of its nearly 4,000-foot summit is treeless and home to several rare plant species, protected within the Buffalo Mountain Natural Area Preserve. Local legend holds that mothers would tell their teenage children they could drive anywhere they wished as long as they could still see “the Buffalo.”
This was the first and flagship Childress church, where he started his preaching career.
We were pleasantly surprised to find the door open to the church and our entry was met with lovely music from the faux pipe organ. There we met Michael Gould, whose interesting story led him to this remote church. With a thick, unexpected New England accent, Gould said he’d gone to Longwood College in Farmville, Virginia, and then after stays in Vermont and Texas, made his way back to Virginia. Always musically talented, he has played in churches wherever he has lived.
He said a friend had relocated to Meadows of Dan and had shared the aforementioned book about Childress’ rock churches with him. I asked him what he thought was meant by moving a mountain.
“I think it meant a man who changed the countryside, who cleaned up the hills and brought a lot of people to find a religious association,” he said.
“I’m a Baptist from Boston,” said Gould, who sported a mop of white hair. “On my first visit (here to the church), a woman greeted me and I made a comment about the organ, which I could see from the entrance. She said, ‘It’s too bad it doesn’t get played.’ She told me the pianist didn’t know how to play the organ. ‘We haven’t heard that organ for seven years.’ So I offered to play it.”
Before Gould knew it, he was their new organist. It was an Estey organ.
“It is a reed rather than a pipe organ, the most prolific in the world. This organ was made in Brattleboro, Vermont, seven miles from my cabin. I knew personally the man who came down and installed it 40 years ago. I learned how to play on an Estey organ,” he said.
Professionally, Gould worked as a computer programmer, but always played music for churches. Now he plays piano and organ at several locally.
“I love sharing my (musical) talent, visiting many churches and playing for them. Churches are having trouble finding organists,” Gould said.
One might expect the congregation to be mostly local families, who had attended through the generations, but Gould said they get lots of visitors, especially during the summer.
“This time of year, we typically get around 35 or 40 people in attendance. In the seven years since I arrived, we now have four people who can play (the piano or organ),” he said. “Stuart Childress, the grandson of Bob Childress, preaches here twice a month, and his son, Zane, Bob’s great-grandson, is also a gifted preacher. Preaching is in their genes.”
A dark-haired woman whom he introduced as Jody entered the sanctuary and joined the conversation. He said she was one of the four others who could play, and she had come there to practice with him.
Jody Hanet (She pronounced it as “han-nay,” saying, “It’s French.”) moved to the area from Louisiana. She and her husband started a truffle farm as a long-term investment. It will take seven years before she gets her first harvest.
“We planted about 2,000 oak and hazelnut trees. And now we’re waiting,” she said.
It takes a lot of faith to sew a crop you won’t reap for seven years.
Moments later, the pair sat shoulder-to-shoulder before a magnificent grand piano donated by a parishioner, playing a duet hymn for their visitors. From the musical artistry of 16 fingers and four thumbs, from a Baptist computer programmer from Boston and a truffle farmer from Louisiana, emanated beautiful music into the appreciative ears of two motorcyclists — Piazza, the Catholic retired professor from the Midwest, and myself, the Jewish writer from Blacksburg — in a storied, nearly century-old stone church smack-dab in the middle of nowhere, Virginia.
Sublime.
Back outside, we admired the view and took photos of the immaculately manicured cemetery containing the Childress family tombstones. A large triple-headstone marked Bob’s passing in 1956, along with his wife, Lelia (1895-1983), and their daughter, Hattie (1926-1950), with the dramatic, unmistakable Buffalo Mountain looming on the eastern horizon.
Crooked roads and three more rock churches beckoned us back to the bikes, westward.
•••
Our next stop was back on the Blue Ridge Parkway at the Bluemont Presbyterian Church. From what I understood, this church, with a cornerstone reading 1919, predated The Rev. Childress’ work, and was only later clad with rocks. Above the cornerstone was a bronze marker designating this church, as all the others as well, a Virginia Historic Landmark, and placed on the National Register of Historic Places. To our delight, it was open as well, and Pastor Jeff Garrison greeted us.
Garrison told us he split his time each Sunday morning between a service here and at the Mayberry church we had already visited. “I do Bluemont at 9,” he said, “and then I go to Mayberry and do the service there next at 11. They’re 11 miles apart and it takes 20 minutes to drive there, a bit longer in the winter when the parkway is closed.”
The pastor grew up in coastal North Carolina and served churches all over the country, including in New York, Utah, Michigan and Savannah, Georgia.
“I’m 68, and when I came here, I told them I’d do this until I was 70. By the time I got here, my retirement was set,” Garrison said.
He was a jovial man with a salt-and-pepper beard, a baseball cap, and a white, blue, red and black plaid flannel shirt with a pen and pencil in the pocket.
“We have 30 members here and 45 there (in Mayberry). We get 20 to 25 here most Sundays, fewer in the winter. It’s hard to get here in the winter. We have lots of people who are only here part-time, who may have a cabin or vacation home. Most of our congregation is permanent residents. We have people who have ties to the church for generations,” he said.
Most people who move here are retired or they have jobs they can do from home, like Garrison’s wife and daughter.
“All the churches in the area are small. Traditionally, they served small areas around them. Now this one doesn’t really have a community. This Bluemont church is interesting in that the congregation doesn’t own the church; it’s owned by the federal government. The church predates the parkway, and it is so close to it that when the government began condemning land to build the scenic road, the church was in the right-of-way. The government condemned and took it but gave the church back to the congregation on a lifetime lease.
“As long as it remains a church, we have the right to keep and use it. We may be the only church owned by the federal government within the national park,” Garrison said.
Back outside, to the southeast over the cemetery was a magnificent sky with a combined cumulus/altocumulus cloud formation, with big, puffy clouds in the foreground and thin, rippled, wave-like clouds far above. Quite lovely and intriguing.
Four down, two to go. On the road again.
•••
More pastoral country lanes, some centerline painted, some not, with ups and downs, creeks and hillsides, mixing forest tunnels and distant horizons. Deer, wild turkey, squirrels. The Honda below me hummed along effortlessly, lazily mostly and briskly when asked, all the while sipping gas at 70-plus mpg. Piazza can push his huge Harley faster than reason would allow, but on this day, smelling the honeysuckle was in order. I spent most of the ride in the NC750X’s relaxation mode, between 2,500 and 3,500 rpm in third and fourth gears, loping quietly along and feeling the joy that only motorcycling can bring.
Our next stop was the Dinwiddie Presbyterian Church. Built in 1948, it also features a square tower rather than a spire, at the front through which the church is entered. The area surrounding it was more open, allowing expansive views to the south and east, again including Buffalo Mountain. A maintenance worker let us inside, where the ceiling was remarkable, with massive timber-frame beams arching above. A large, lovely tapestry quilt with an image of the church adorned the entrance wall.
Last, and perhaps least, we stopped at what was the Willis Presbyterian Church in Willis. This was one of the later-built churches and, from the outside, looked among the smallest. It also featured a bell tower rather than a spire. A sign by the highway read, “New Beginnings House of God,” suggesting that it was the only one no longer a Presbyterian church. Nobody was around.
Our tour now finished, Piazza headed east back to Floyd, and I went due north through Indian Valley on my way back to Blacksburg.
More stunning Virginia mountain countryside, more empty roads. More curves. More joy.
Michael Abraham is a Blacksburg, Virginia, based writer and businessman. He has eight books in print, including “Harmonic Highways, Exploring Virginia’s Crooked Road.”
