The Oakland Presbyterian Church rests boarded up in a tree- shaded hollow between the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad and Route 696 from Clifton Forge to Covington, Virginia. Small gray Confederate States of America crosses dot the church's grounds among other gravesites and hint of the history that resonates from the building's deep-red hue. Indeed, as the oldest church structure in Alleghany County, the Oakland Church and its cemetery serve as vital testimonies to the area's social and economic past.

Before Europeans began settling in the mountainous region of present-day Alleghany County, Native Americans traversed the land on hunting expeditions. For these travelers--the Shawnee, Delaware, and Mingo, among others--the hilly environment proved more suitable for transient than permanent settlement (Morton 1923, p. 30). In the last decades before America's revolutionary war, Scotch-Irish families began to filter into the Appalachian Mountains, taking comfort in rough terrain that promised autonomy from religious authorities and echoed with physical reminders of their homeland. As Presbyterians and Catholics from the Irish province of Ulster whose religious preferences had attracted disapproval and often persecution from representatives of the Church of England, thousands of Scotch-Irish fled to the New World in the mid and late eighteenth century. They arrived in the port of Philadelphia and traveled by wagon down well-worn Indian trails into the western region of Virginia. In Augusta, Botetourt, and Bath counties, Scotch-Irish men and women established homesteads and prepared the land for various crops, including wheat, oats, tobacco, and corn.

In 1782, the Scotch-Irish family of Joseph Haynes, who had fled to America eight years previously, purchased 168 acres of land on the western side of the Jackson River near present-day Clifton Forge. Haynes and his laborers set to work building a plantation that eventually boasted a gristmill along the Jackson River. Upon Joseph's death in 1815, his only son William Henry inherited the property and the duties of master of the plantation. Around this time, a portion of Haynes's land along the banks of the Jackson River began to serve as a cemetery for local residents. According to grave markers, a man named Jacob Harnsbarger occupied the earliest grave in 1819; he was soon joined by Andrew and Jean Williamson, a Scottish couple for whom the neighboring area of Williamson (Clifton Forge) was named. Three years later, the Virginia General Assembly created Alleghany County, which had been previously incorporated into surrounding counties.

By the 1830s, the evangelical spirit of the Second Great Awakening had scaled the Appalachians. It soon enticed several residents in the Williamson area to seek out a new place of worship. In 1834, William Henry Haynes donated the land on which the cemetery budded for the construction of a church. Slaves from the Haynes plantation prepared bricks for the structure and transported them to the site in saddle bags. Though modest in design and dimension (30' by 40'), the "Church by the Spring" attracted worshipers from various Protestant denominations to its one-story gallery. Doors on the eastern and western sides provided separate entrance for male and female worshipers (eventually the doors were torn out and replaced with bricks). Caught up in the spirit of revivalism, some local landowners insisted that their slaves attend the church, where the bondsmen watched the services from a balcony that lines three of the four walls.

In 1847, the Church by the Spring became affiliated with the Covington Presbyterian Church. Nine years later, the church, known as Oakland Grove Presbyterian, stood watch as William Henry Haynes sold land around the structure to the Virginia Central Railroad, which proceeded to build a rail line past the church's northern side to some 200 yards east, where work halted at the Jackson River Depot in 1857. The depot remained the railroad's western terminus for ten years. The railroad brought hundreds of new immigrants to the area, where nine Presbyterian churches and five Methodist churches waited to serve them (Morton 1923, p. 45). A hotel sprang up to accommodate passengers disembarking at Jackson River Depot, including upper-class vacationers heading for the famous springs nearby. In 1859, William Henry Haynes officially deeded the church and the cemetery to the trustees of the Oakland Grove Church.

The outbreak of civil war in 1861 abruptly snuffed the air of optimism surrounding Oakland Grove and Jackson River Depot. While most white families in Alleghany County pledged allegiance to the Confederate cause, it was a cavalry detachment from the Union side that first occupied the depot in May 1861, plundering the station of its serviceable goods (Corron nd., p. 11). By 1863, white women from the surrounding community had established the church as a hospital for the Confederate sick and wounded, who were carried to the site by flatboat or by rail. In December 1863, Confederate colonel W.L. "Mudwall" Jackson ingeniously protected his troops' food supply from one of Union general William Averell's raids by stowing the items in the Oakland Church behind doors posted with smallpox warnings. Averell's assaults nevertheless proved damaging to the Confederacy and to the county by further damaging the Jackson River Depot and destroying much of the railroad; by war's end in 1865, both were practically unserviceable. While laborers began repairing the railroad, the internment of twelve Confederate soldiers from a Tennessee regiment in Oakland's cemetery remained as a reminder of the war's destruction. The cemetery also encompassed the graves of five other soldiers and two Confederate nurses.

In the postwar and New South era, the Oakland Church ebbed and flowed with the vagaries of the local economy. The Chesapeake & Ohio Railroad, which had taken over Virginia Central, extended the line beyond Jackson River depot to the Ohio River by 1872, thus depriving the church of the terminus's business and vitality. Protestant churches sprouted up to serve residents, including a growing population of iron miners. After Oakland Grove Church became an independent congregation of the Montgomery Presbytery in 1871, its members set about establishing Presbyterian churches in Clifton Forge and Low Moor, and many of them left the Church by the Spring to worship at the new sites. Still, Oakland Grove remained a vital locus of communal and religious activity; special trains periodically carried mourners from Clifton Forge to the church for funeral Services (Corron nd., p. 15). In a demonstration of Oakland's interwoven relationship with the railroad, the C & 0 purchased Haynes's land surrounding the church In 1889 and constructed yards and shops that revitalized the Clifton Forge area by the early 1900s.

Through much of the twentieth century, the Oakland Church continued to hold services. Members paid homage to the church's antebellum heritage by refusing to electrify Oakland and by joining with the Julia Jackson Chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy in 1953 to erect a plaque commemorating the structure for its service as a Confederate hospital. By 1963, however, Oakland's dwindling congregation convinced the Montgomery Presbytery that the time had arrived for Oakland's closure, and the church held its last service on December 23, 1963. Over 200 gravesites presently crowd the church's grounds. Through the vigilant care of members of the Low Moor Presbyterian Church and annual memorial services, local residents continue to recognize both the church's and the cemetery's contribution to the county's past.

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Bibliography

Alleghany County Heritage Book Committee, Alleghany County Heritage, Vol. 1, 1746-1997, 1986.

Corron, Elizabeth H. Clifton Forge, Virginia: Scenic, Busy, Friendly.

Hogs, Anne M. Virginia Cemeteries: A Guide to Resources (Charlottesville, VA.- University Press of Virginia, 1986).

Morton, Oren F. A Centennial History of Alleghany County, VA (Dayton, VA: JK Rucbush Company, 1923).

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The author, Juliette Landphair, is a Ph.D. candidate in History at the University of Virginia. Her specialty is Southern History.

This historical background was written as part of a cultural resource management survey project conducted by Preservation Technologies, Inc. The survey was commissioned by the Kim Stan Advisory Committee in Alleghany County, as part of a Transportation Enhancement Program titled, Oakland Presbeterian Church and Cemetery Preservation Project, Near the Site of Jackson River Depot.