Emily Paine Carter

Recent columns

• Readers write of run-ins with political bigwigs
• Recording holds clues from 6 decades ago
• Rubbed shoulders with any big names?
• Column archive

"When I was not quite three, I got drunk. That's the first thing I remember in my whole life." So began the recollections of Bob Childress, mountain preacher (1890-1956).

The rock-hard man's exploits are recounted in Richard Davids' 1970 book, "The Man Who Moved a Mountain." It appeals to history lovers as well as to those interested in journeys -- both geographical and spiritual.

Last year the St. Paul's (Salem) Episcopal Guild of Martha & Mary read the book, which a local bookseller kindly ordered and discounted for our group. We were so interested in Childress' saga that we later toured the churches he built and served in Floyd, Patrick and Carroll counties.

We gazed at gorgeous spring scenery: bright pastures, rhododendron-thick hills, snaking creeks. We sandwiched lunch at the nearby Chateau Morrisette into our schedule.

Maybe a winter journey would be appropriate, when trees stand like Shakespeare's "bare-ruined choirs." Our scene was almost too beautiful: a contrast with the early stories of the rough-hewn minister and those hard-scrabble lives.

Davids had described those people of the mist-shrouded Blue Ridge's Buffalo Mountain as "captive to the unchanging ways of generations past ... a heritage of proud independence -- but also of poverty and ignorance, fear and superstition, violence and sudden death. ... Killings provided the excitement -- almost the entertainment." These were descendants of Scots-Irish settlers: hard drinkers who settled disputes not with the law, but with fists and guns. (We might know some kinfolk.)

Childress had been such a man: a heavy drinker, wounded and scarred by gunshot and brawls. But then, wrote Davids, Childress was transformed by God -- "and the change in him shook and transformed Buffalo Mountain."

Davids had met the "overwhelming, magnetic" man in 1950. He learned of Childress' struggles, how brandy had been "god in [his] cabin," how he and his wife reared seven children, how he got through Richmond's Union Theological Seminary as a needy, much-older student.

He heard how Childress built those six field-rock churches back home (1929-54). By 1938 he was preaching in eight churches and driving 40,000 to 50,000 miles a year. He also tended to his brethren's economic needs by helping with farms, pressuring officials for roads and giving impoverished men jobs at his sawmill. Some Salem and Roanoke folks recall Childress' preaching in our local Presbyterian churches and seeking support for his mountain missions.

On this bright day we first admired his Willis Presbyterian Church (1954), now home of Grace Baptist Church. We inspected the cornerstone -- the best rock -- and the quartz and even seashells worked into the mortar; this reminded Salemite Jessie Rusinko and me of the marbles in a Richlands church's stone wall. And we all beheld the Norman tower, topped with heaven-pointing, upright rocks.

"Upright": how fitting. "He gave most of us all the upright we ever knew," one of his flock had said.

You can still hear stories, wrote Davids, of someone "Bob Childress helped to stop drinking, to get through school, to bear a sickness, or simply learn to love." Now there's a legacy, as firm a foundation as those rock churches.

A Google search ("Bob Childress" rock churches) yielded about 300 references. Other recent books about Scots-Irish settlers: "Born Fighting: How the Scots-Irish Shaped America" (James Webb); "Strange Kin: Ireland and the American South" (Kieran Quinlan); "How the Scots Made America" (Michael Fry).