History

Speaking of the Past | An Historic Church

The property at Mountain Light was likely inhabited by Monacan Indians before settlers of various cultural ancestry, including some descendants of Revolutionary War soldiers or folks displaced by the War Between the States, discovered the remote safety of the Blue Ridge Mountains. An Anglican clergyman, Frederick W. Neve, who initially served St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Ivy and Emmanuel Church, Greenwood felt the call to serve the mountain people, whose impoverished lives he felt could be transformed with education and church community. In 1890, two years after he arrived from England, Father Neve established his first mission church with the help of his parishioners. This church, St. John the Baptist, which was dedicated to Neve’s mother, was the beginning of his drive to establish a school and church every ten miles across the mountains. His mission work educated hundreds of children whom state education had not served in these remote locations, and the church community that grew with each school would begin in the open air until funds for a church were donated. Land at Blackwell’s Hollow was donated for a chapel, St. John the Evangelist, and a mission school, both operating successfully until a fire in 1932. The school would be replaced by the state, the mission home was rebuilt by the Archdeaconry, and the replacement church was the original St. John the Baptist, now too small to serve its thriving congregation, and so moved to serve Blackwell’s Hollow five months after the fire that claimed the chapel. Renamed St. John’s, the church was re-consecrated in May 1933 with the bell from the original church in its bell tower.

To learn more, visit St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Ivy to read the historical marker about Archdeacon of the Blue Ridge, Frederick Neve, and read Frances Scruby’s account of him in Neve: Virginia’s Thousandfold Man.