A slide show prepared for a history conference on the general topic of transportation...this is the story of an Episcopal Church ( in Fincastle) that started a renovation project of a mission church ( in Eagle Rock) and of the wonderful community they found there... It offers a nice example of collecting oral histories, encouraging preservation of a nearly abandoned building, and offers inspiration for re-purposing and reviving rural communities. ...Also touches on youth ministry, segregation, integration, canals, railroads, and nineteenth century industrial development.

1. A 21st century “voyage of discovery” …to Eagle Rock
By Ellen Apperson Brown
Renovation projects, of a rural church and a town’s community center
have brought together two groups – an Episcopal church, in Fincastle
and the Eagle Rock Ruritan Club, and set in motion an interesting
cultural exchange.

2. Only ten miles…From Fincastle to Eagle Rock
The Episcopal Diocese of Southwest Virginia was planning to sell off
one of its old churches – Emmanuel, Eagle Rock - but parishioners
at St. Mark’s, Fincastle, decided to take responsibility for restoring
the old frame building (the first church in Eagle Rock, built in 1885).
About the same time, members of the Eagle Rock Ruritan Club
asked the county government to let them take ownership of the
town’s community center. They began planning for major repairs.
Soon both groups, the Ruritans and the Episcopalians, began to
collaborate together, holding meetings at a local restaurant and later
in the public library.
Now, a year or so later, both renovation projects are well underway,
and the two communities have developed closer ties. …And ten
miles doesn’t seem quite such a distance anymore.

3. About Episcopal Churches in
Botetourt County…
St. Mark’s Church was built
in the 1830s, but never had
the money or resources to
be a free standing parish
until the 1960s. For many
years St. Mark’s shared its
clergy with the two other
churches in the county –
Emmanuel, Eagle Rock and
Trinity, Buchanan.
In the 1880’s, Eagle Rock
was booming, and a plans
developed to build a church.
The organizers borrowed
$250 from a National
Church Building fund.
The style ,known as Carpenter Gothic, featured a
steep roof, pointed windows, and board and
batten siding. It may have been built using plans
furnished through the National church, and
perhaps using pre-fab materials shipped by
train…thus an early mail-order church!

4. A good source of information about Eagle Rock is the book …Lost
Communities of Virginia by Terri Fisher and Kirsten Sparenborg
The authors describe the floods, industries, and the changes in
transportation - from the canal to the railroad - and include
interviews with several local historians. They capture the
ongoing vitality of the people who live there:
…Certainly the impending loss of the bridge had caused great hardship
to Eagle Rock, but it also brought the people together. The Eagle Rock
Improvement Association was created to clean up the community and
make it more attractive to residents and those who make the effort to
visit. Projects included a new playground, hanging baskets in the
spring and wreaths on winter, washing storefront windows, cleaning
the river bank, and creating parks at the old lime kilns and last lock of
the James River and Kanawha Canal.
However, some people do not like to think of Eagle Rock as a
“lost community!”

5. …Beginning a pilgrimage down the road, from Fincastle to Eagle Rock…
Father Stephen Stanley
Hired in 2011, he was charged with
responsibility for not only St. Mark’s
Fincastle, but also the Glebe
Retirement Center, and Emmanuel
Church, Eagle Rock. He began taking
parishioners out to see the church,
and encouraging everyone to join
him for a meal at Maw and Paw’s
Restaurant. Then, he joined the
Eagle Rock Ruritan Club and learned
about their plans to make repairs to
the Community Center.
In July, a group of youth from the
diocese came to help clean up the
church in Eagle Rock and to learn
about local history. (Shown here
with Fr. Stephen at St. Mark’s)

6. St. Mark’s Vestry authorized Fr. Stephen to develop a list of
objectives.
The “to do” list included:
• Bee removal
• Leaks around the
roof and siding
• Mold on interior
walls
• Weeds ( and poison
ivy) around
gravestones
• Sacristy… needing
major repairs

7. Excitement grew as parishioners began to get involved, and help in
various clean-up efforts. Here they are enjoying a parish picnic in
the shelter near Galatia Presbyterian Church

8. Events
Mass on the Mountain – May 2013 - about 30
youth from the diocese, with parents, and lively
music!
Work Days…washing walls
Youth Pilgrimage – July 2013; gathering oral
histories
Appalachian Vespers Services, featuring gospel
and folk musicians

9. A Diocesan youth group planned a pilgrimage to several rural
communities in SWVA, including Bluefield, Tazewell, Pocahontas, and
Glasgow, with a two day visit to Fincastle and Eagle Rock. Several of
the young historians conducted interviews with some of the local
people. Here are some of the comments they collected.
Peggy Hamm (retired
teacher) told about
her church, the black
community, and her
perspective
concerning
desegregation in the
public schools

10. Peggy Hamm – excerpts from her talk
…About Glen Wilton
…people from the Historical Society called me to see if I
could find out any information about the black community
known as Glen Wilton.
When I moved there…there was a lot of people there, but
most of them died. When you are in a rural area, unless
somebody has willed you the house ( your great grandma or
something)…
Nobody moved there. Nobody wanted to move to a rural
area, because there were no schools.

11. Peggy Hamm
…About Mount Beulah Baptist Church
…the church that I go to is Mount Beulah Baptist Church, and it is
a black church. It originated…it was in the town of Glen Wilton.
It used to be over by an old furnace.
That was when they had a booming Glen Wilton. They had a
church and a …near where they had an iron furnace…until they
had some sort of explosion, the mine closed, and people moved
out. There weren’t any more jobs except that and the railroad.
And then they moved our church…I guess they had to build a
new foundation.

12. Peggy Hamm
Mount Beulah, cont.
If you see a sign that says a church was built using brick from
another church, well there are churches in this area with bricks
from great grandma’s church.
Most of the rural churches make their money from
homecomings or rallies. That is where we get the money from –
from September to September. That is when you call
everybody, or write to everybody, whose parents were buried in
the graveyard…

13. Peggy Hamm
Raising money for the church
That is what I do. I get a little form letter and say, “This is our
letter for this year. We need money for the church.”
That was the main source of income for a rural church, and
having rallies and fish fries, and stuff. I know my pastor used
to say, “I know it is dwindling, but if we tithe, I know it is
going to make a way…
Youth – You need more than that!
Peggy – You need a lot of blessings!

14. Peggy Hamm
An outhouse…
When I first came down here we had an outhouse for the
church. A little outdoor thing. …and it had a little shed for
storing all those things that you didn’t have room for, inside.
Then we got running water…after they got water available up
the road, so we pumped it down here, and then we got a
kitchen, with a stove.
For Homecoming we needed a kitchen for all the food, and
about ten – fifteen years after that we finally got the money
together to have a bathroom! We had one for men and one
for women – we had two! We also had a little dressing room
for the choir.

15. Peggy Hamm
her family…
Peggy - I have four children. My daughter, she’s the manager of a
doctor’s office, but she sings. She goes up there and she sings.
She sings all over the place. I don’t know if Tommy has heard her
sing?
Tommy Hunter – Yes. I have heard her!
Peggy – I have a son, and he is a deacon, and he sings, you know.
I have another son who has moved back from Connecticut, so we
have five more people who can come to church – my son and his
three kids! All of a sudden you have a whole lot of people in
church…

16. Pastor Robert McRae
Flood of 1985
In 1985 we had a flood and the debris… it didn’t bother this
bridge that we were using, which is now the old bridge, but it
wiped out two sections of this bridge and took them down
the river.
You asked about the impact of the railroad? The canal…the
reason the canal was not completed? Guess why. The
railroad came by.
A lady named Nadine Rankin ( her former husband was a
doctor here and had a little clinic across the river), but she
went from nurse to teaching school. She is a historian for
this part of the county…though she moved to Fincastle.

17. Pastor McRae
…About the dedication for the park
When the garden club had a dedication for the little park here,
the last lock of the Kanawha Canal, Nadine was sort of a host
for that meeting. We had a big day. We had a lot of folks here.
We had a batteaux group that came, and we were celebrating!
It was an historical celebration. In the middle of her speaking,
do you know what happened? The train came through! And
she caught the moment by saying, “well, upstaged by the
railroad again, because the canal was never finished. “

18. Pastor McRae
What are his hopes for the future?
Bob - I think that the hope here, in many respects , lies in the
people. And to see a group like this come – this is encouraging!
But it has been encouraging for us to be active in the Ruritan
Club. I have been in it for the 30 years that I have been here.
…And the Community Center…Do you know what was going to
be done with that?
Ellen – Tear it down!
Bob – It was to be torn down. And Donna Vaughn, who will be
your hostess ( you met her husband out here) – she served and
finished out a term as supervisor, so she knows the goings on in
the county, and she went to bat for us, and she said we can’t let
that building go. We can’t let it be destroyed. She was
responsible for our being able to acquire that. Our hope is in the
people.

19. Nadine Rankin
How did Eagle Rock get its name?
Well, there was, before VDOT (Virginia Department of
Transportation) there was a huge rock right across the
bridge, right as you came into… It was a huge prominence,
and it came out like the head of an eagle. Of course they
blasted that off, but above that they found huge nests of
eagles. And so I think that the Indians named it Eagle Rock
because they revered the Eagle so much. That is just
conjecture, but it might have been a possibility.

20. Nadine Rankin, cont.
Other names…
Nadine – The place was first known as Sheets.
Youth – We were told that. We were thinking of the gas
station (Sheets) of course.
Nadine – He (Sheets) owned all of this land. He was the
one if, of course, if you wanted to buy any land… The
railroad wanted to buy the right of way for the land, so
they purchased a parcel so wide, and then 1,000 feet
down. As the settlement grew, they wanted to have a
post office. Before you can have a post office, you have to
be legal, and they first named the community
Breckinridge, and then they named it Sheets, because of
the owner, and then it came around to Eagle Rock

21. Becoming a village
Nadine - So in 1879, as the sign coming into town says, it was declared a
village. It didn’t really qualify as a village. You know from your studies that a
village is a large piece of land, but I would say…it was a community, really. Of
course, there were no roads…no nothing, and the only travel was by
batteaux! Do you know what a batteau was?
Gabie – Yes, M’am. I go to the batteaux festival every year!
Nadine – Good deal…They have those big old twenty foot long, and seven
foot wide…and it goes back to…They came all the way from Covington, and
they brought wheat and corn, hogsheads. Do you know what a hogshead is?
It is not the head of a pig… It is a four by four square of tobacco that is rolled
real tight, and is put in this shape…and they always weighed over 1,000
pounds! They hauled them down, because they wanted them to go to
Richmond.

22. The first industry and the first church… in Eagle Rock…
Eagle Rock was a boom town which enjoyed its first major
commercial enterprise, the production of lime and dolomite
products – until 1954. Agricultural lime was sold to increase the
P.H. in plant life for the farmer, as a catalyst in the making of pig
iron, and as white wash. There were nine active kilns in the
community which hired 100 workers. Eagle Rock was the center
of industry for Botetourt County.
The first church in the community was the Episcopal
Church…organized in 1877, built in 1885, and was used by other
groups before they could build their own churches

23. Our latest history project:
The Eagle Connection
After the youth pilgrimage, I decided to follow up with Nadine Rankin, and
ask to see if she might be interested in having her set of newsletters
published in book form… As of mid February, we’ve sold about 150 copies and
are well on our way to raising our goal of $4,000 – to be split between the
two renovation projects in Eagle Rock.

28. The take-away lesson for me, as a public historian, is that in order to
learn about a community ( lost or found)…one has to locate the right
people, and earn their trust. The three historians I’ve quoted here
(Nadine Rankin, Robert McRae and Peggy Hamm) allowed me to feel
the pulse and experience the vitality of a remarkable community.
What a gift!