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SYLVATUS -- Robert Childress was a drinker.

And a gambler.

And a brawler.

Then one night in 1910, at the end of another spree, Childress found himself outside a Methodist church. He heard singing. There was a revival going on. Childress went inside and surprised himself by answering the altar call. The experience didn't make him a new man right away, but it gave him a new sense of peace.

He stopped carrying his pistol.

Eventually, instead of being someone you could count on to start a ruckus, he became the deputy the Patrick County sheriff depended on to break up a ruckus. Then he became a preacher. Then he started building churches. Six of them.

On Wednesday, the Childress rock churches in Floyd, Patrick and Carroll counties were added to the Virginia Landmarks Register. With the designation came automatic nomination for the National Register of Historic Places. It's another recognition for a man who's become a legend since his death in 1956.

Gene Dalton | The Roanoke Times

Mayberry Presbyterian Church in Patrick County.

"Sometimes I get a little anxious about the credit people give my grandfather instead of God," Stewart Childress said as Spankie, his Boston bull terrier, pulled him over a hill behind his grandfather's house.

"Sometimes people ask me, 'Do you know how many souls your grandfather saved?' I tell them I know exactly how many he saved. Zero. He didn't have the power to save anybody. God does that."

God often calls ordinary people to extraordinary work, Childress said. That's what happened in Robert Childress' case, his grandson said. He was just a man, with strengths and shortcomings like any other. But the stories told about Robert Childress make it hard to think of him as ordinary.

"When I was not quite 3, I got drunk. That's the first thing I remember in my whole life," is how Robert Childress began his never-finished autobiography.

Childress was one of the 1,000 or so children delivered by Aunt Orlean Puckett, the legendary midwife whose cabin sits by the Blue Ridge Parkway. A big man with a big voice, he was a dedicated drinker and famous fighter. He was a logger, a blacksmith and a deputy before he became a preacher. He built churches and congregations that still stand five decades after his death.

Gene Dalton | The Roanoke Times

Richard Slate helped build the Dinwiddie Presbyterian Church.

Richard Slate helped Childress build one of those churches. Wounded in the Battle of the Bulge, Slate got out of the habit of going to church after he came back from World War II. Childress invited him to come to Dinwiddie Presbyterian, which was meeting in an old schoolhouse in the Carroll County community of Sylvatus.

Slate went to hear Childress preach, then he helped Childress build a new Dinwiddie Presbyterian Church.

After one service in the schoolhouse, the collection plate held $5.60. Slate said Childress decided not to take it.

"In that rough mountaineer way he had, he said, 'That's not enough money for me. We're going to turn that over to the Lord to build a church.' "

And so they did. One member of the congregation donated the land. Others donated materials, money and time. They brought stones from their fields to build the walls.

"Times were hard at that time," Slate said. "I guess the biggest donation we got was $100."

The walls were up and there was gravel in the floor, waiting for concrete to be poured, when Childress brought a Mrs. Fishburne to see the progress.

"She said, 'That's a pretty church,' " Slate recalled. "And Mr. Childress said, 'Pretty enough for you to put a roof on it?' "

"That's just the kind of person he was," Slate said.

Gene Dalton | The Roanoke Times

Slate Mountain Presbyterian Church in Floyd County.

A few days later, a truckload of shingles arrived at the work site.

Childress preached a revival in North Carolina, Slate said, and received a new Chrysler in payment. He sold it to pay for the church's doors and windows.

Some of the rocks in the Dinwiddie church's 20-inch thick walls were hauled in an Army surplus weapons carrier all the way from Buffalo Mountain, a distant hump on the horizon from the Dinwiddie church's front door.

Buffalo Mountain was Childress' first assignment after seminary. In 1926, the 36-year-old, newly minted pastor took his wife and seven children to a hollow below Buffalo Mountain to supervise the Buffalo Mountain Mission School, a three-story building that served as grade school, high school, church and community center.

In 1929 he oversaw the construction of a proper Buffalo Mountain church built of fieldstone. It became the mother church of his ministry. Slate Mountain church was next, in 1932. In 1946, Childress put rock facing on the Bluemont church. In 1948, he put rock facing on the Mayberry church. Dinwiddie was next in 1948. The last was in Willis, when he converted a bank building into a church in 1954.

Gene Dalton | The Roanoke Times

Bluemont Presbyterian Church in Patrick County.

All are still active Presbyterian churches, except for the one in Willis, which houses a Baptist congregation.

Three of his sons became ministers, and now his grandson, Stewart Childress, is one spring away from graduating from seminary. He lives in a place called The Hollow, not far from Ararat. His grandfather grew up in The Hollow.

"I guess as the crow flies, I only live about a mile from where he was born," Childress said.

Stewart Childress, 52, came to the ministry even later than his grandfather, after spending more than 20 years "in corporate America." He was still in corporate America when he began as a lay preacher.

"The more I began to fill pulpits for people, the more people would call," he said.

Gene Dalton | The Roanoke Times

Buffalo Mountain Presbyterian Church.

Some people just assumed he'd deliver a great sermon because of his bloodlines. Some started asking him when he was going to start preaching full time. He kept telling them he just hadn't heard the call. Then, during a service at Mayberry Presbyterian Church, where his grandfather pastored while he still was a seminary student, he heard it.

So now he's the student supply pastor at Mayberry and Bluemont, looking forward to July, when he expects to be ordained.

"I don't know if God'll call me to stay in this area or not," Childress said. "I hope he does."

He'd be happy to stay in these mountains his whole ministerial career, Childress said as he and Spankie led a tour of the manse, the school and church where his grandfather's ministry began.

Gene Dalton | The Roanoke Times

Willis church now houses Baptist congregation.

Stewart Childress wasn't quite 4 years old when Robert Childress died, and he says his only memory of his grandfather is his funeral. He remembers his grandmother raising her veil and bending down to kiss her husband as he lay in his coffin. So Childress only knows about his grandfather's laugh and his grandfather's bigger-than-life personality from the stories he's heard.

But last December Stewart Childress was in the pulpit at Bluemont Presbyterian Church, delivering a sermon based on a Scripture text and an outline his grandfather had used, standing on the same spot, exactly 50 years before.

It had been Robert Childress' last sermon.

"I felt kind of close to him then," Stewart Childress said.