Mount Carmel Methodist Church

Near Berry’s Ferry (Clarke County), Virginia
Built (circa) 1760 

Home in the 1930's Details from 1904 Church Records Own a Slice of History Church Location Contact

Own a Slice of Mt. Carmel History


To order a log slice plaque
please mail a donation check as generous as possible to:
Mt. Carmel Methodist Church
c/o Jim Royston
1904 John Mosby Highway
Boyce, Virginia 22620

All proceeds to be used for church building fund

Plaques are made from a slice of the original logs taken from the church during a recent repair. Each slice is finished with multiple coats of Minwax® Polyurethane clear coat semi-gloss to enhance the grain of the wood..
 


These tree slices came from logs that were removed from a section of the west end of the Mt. Carmel church as it was being repaired in 2004. Some of the slices allow the rings to be counted and they show logs that were over 100 years old when they were cut to build the church. The quality of the logs vary, as does the quality of each memento, but it is the memory of the church that is important.

The original church was made of logs.  It was covered with weatherboarding in later years. The logs that were removed and from which these plaques were made, came from between the two lower windows.

Little detail of the actual building of the church is available.

The location is on the vast land grant once owned by Lord Fairfax, just off of Route 50 in the Blue Ridge Mountains. 

Legend has it that a Miss Polly Ann Green once nursed Lord Fairfax back to health at his Greenway Court home near White Post, Virginia, some six miles away.  She was an ardent prayer and as she prayed for his recovery she asked him for a place to build a church near her home in the Blue Ridge Mountains on the Ashby Gap Toll Road.

He granted her wish and the land was surveyed by his surveyor, young George Washington.

The church was first built of logs which later were covered with weather boarding. The original design had two entrances, one for the ladies and one for the gentlemen.  A center divider was in place to insure the separation of the sexes.  It also had a balcony which was reserved for the slaves.

In the Journals of Amanda Virginia Edmonds 1857-1867 she tells of going to Mount Carmel Church a number of times during the Civil War.

 It is shown on the survey of the breakup of the lands owned by Rawleigh Colston in 1834 as a “Meeting House.” Only a few early records remain and these are in notebooks covering the Sunday School activities from 1890-1010. Many of the names listed there were active in the church until mid twentieth century and some of these families continue to be members to the present time.
The balcony has been closed in and the separator between the pews has mostly been removed. Otherwise the construction is basically its historical construction.