Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 11, 1993 TAG: 9304080117
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: KEVIN KITTREDGE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BUFFALO MOUNTAIN LENGTH: Long
HOUSES OF STONE
The story goes that Bob Childress' mother used to pacify him with a rag dipped in moonshine.The legendary preacher's first memory was of being drunk - at age 3. He was frequently drunk growing up.
He also packed a pistol. Childress and his pals would shoot at each other for sport, says a 1970 book about his life, "The Man Who Moved a Mountain."
He was shot twice - in the shoulder and in the leg.
Once, as he played cards with friends in a blacksmith shop, someone smacked him senseless with a whiskey bottle.
Such was the life in the mountains of Patrick County, where Childress grew up some 90 years ago.
A rock-hard, dirt-poor region of few roads and fewer jobs, it offered plenty of violence and cheap whiskey - but little hope. Somewhere, Bob Childress found enough to turn his life around.
Then he set to work on Buffalo Mountain.
He succeeded well enough to become a local legend - and the subject of the 1970 biography by Richard C. Davids.
The book, published by Philadelphia's Fortress Press, is chock-full of stories about the hot-tempered, warmhearted, workaholic Presbyterian preacher.
There are some who say Davids - a journalist who lived in the area for three months, gathering stories for his book - overdid it a little.
That he made things up. That the country around Buffalo Mountain wasn't nearly so full of moonshine stills and mayhem as he wrote.
Bryan Childress isn't one of them.
"You know, any writer - he's not going to tell you exactly how it was. But I thought he did a pretty good job with it," Childress said of the book about his father.
And life was wild here in earlier days, Childress said. "There was a lot of bootlegging. A lot of fussing and fighting and killing. It's a little more civilized down here now."
The stories about his father's early drinking are certainly true, Childress said. "Dad grew up a drunkard. He was addicted to that stuff."
The Rev. Bob Childress won his battle against alcohol - and a lot of other battles - before his death in 1956.
His legacy is in the good roads and bridges and the quiet lives that define the country around Buffalo Mountain now. It is in the book about his life.
And it is in the churches.
There are six of them, all still in use. They were built at Childress' prodding by the sweat of mountain men and women, using rocks hauled in from nearby fields.
The result is as rugged - and appealing - as the hills Bob Childress crisscrossed daily in his Model T Ford.
But why rocks?
"Dad wanted something that would last," said Bryan Childress recently, steering his top-of-the-line Ford pickup truck down the smooth paved roads around Buffalo Mountain. "I think there was something fascinating about using rocks that were lying around in the field."
Seeing all the churches is an afternoon's work.
There is Buffalo Mountain - the biggest. Bluemont and Mayberry, both frame churches which Childress merely encased in rock - the smallest.
Dinwiddie - the prettiest.
And Slate Mountain, a picturesque church in a sloping field near the Blue Ridge Parkway in Floyd County, where Bryan Childress preaches now.
He is not the only Childress to follow in his father's footsteps.
Bob Childress' youngest son, Bob Jr., still preaches at Bluemont and Mayberry churches. A third Childress boy, William, also went into the ministry. He is retired now and lives in Tennessee.
Buffalo Mountain was the first of the rock churches Bob Childress built. It was dedicated in 1929.
Located on the Floyd-Carroll County Line, it is only 100 yards or so from the manse where the preacher lived with his wife, Lelia, and eight children.
From the yard of the manse, the hump-backed profile of Buffalo Mountain is clear a few miles to the east.
Bryan Childress lives in the manse now - though a younger preacher has taken over services at nearby Buffalo Mountain Presbyterian Church.
After "The Man Who Moved a Mountain" came out, people flocked to see the churches. Park rangers along the Blue Ridge Parkway often answered questions - sometimes skeptically - about his father's exploits, Bryan Childress said. He still gets frequent visitors, asking about the late preacher.
Bryan Childress is 71 now - five years older than his father was when he died from a heart attack. Bryan Childress himself has battled cancer.
You can tell from pictures that they shared the same sturdy bodies, jutting jaws and friendly eyes.
Some story
People assumed the Childresses all got rich off "The Man Who Moved a Mountain," Bryan Childress said. The truth is, they never got a penny.
That doesn't bother Childress - though he does think some of the royalties might have gone to the church.
"That book's still selling," he said.
No wonder. It tells some story.
Picture Bob Childress in 1910, stumbling blind through the mountains after a drinking bout.
At 20, he was already so sick of life he had twice put a gun to his temple, though he couldn't pull the trigger.
In an autobiography he never finished, he described the scene this way:
"I found myself six miles from home outside a little church. I never did know how I got there. But I could hear singing. I went in and sat down. . . . I don't remember how it happened, but when the altar call was given, something inside urged me to go forward to the rail. As I knelt I felt no sudden revelation, only a sense of peace. For the first time in my life, it seemed, I rested."
He didn't rest long.
After his conversion, Childress ran a blacksmith shop, then worked for a while as a Patrick County deputy sheriff. He married, lost his wife to illness, remarried.
Finally, improbably, the rejuvenated eighth-grade dropout decided to become a Presbyterian minister.
He returned to school alongside his own children.
"That took some fortitude, didn't it?" asks Bryan Childress now. "It seems unbelievable. It seems like a fairy tale."
Childress quickly soaked up all the little school could offer - then moved his family to Davidson College in North Carolina. They lived there a year on apples and hope.
Then an impatient Childress talked his way straight into Richmond's Union Theological Seminary.
As a talker, "He was very convincing," Bryan Childress said of his father. "Of course, he was able to back it up."
The faculty, doubtful at first that a man with one year of high school and one year of college could do seminary work, quickly learned to respect the big, twangy-voiced mountain man. Childress studied hard and did well, Davids wrote. He was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1926.
He was 36 years old.
Though the new preacher had more than one job offer, he chose the area around Buffalo Mountain.
Bryan Childress tells the story:
"They said, `We've got a place for you up in the mountains,' " he said. " `We'll give you enough work to kill and a living while we're killing you.' "
Big, strong and hot-tempered, the new preacher became known in the early days for hauling hecklers out of his church services by the scruff of the neck. He is even said to have flung a chair or two.
Bryan Childress recalled that his father once told a rowdy church visitor, "If I can't preach the Lord into you, I'll kick the devil out of you."
"They weren't really bad," Bryan Childress said of those early hecklers. "They were just being mischievous. They wanted to try Dad out."
They had met their match. Childress even took a stand against alcohol - a gutsy position in those days, in a region besotted with moonshine.
And he made enemies. A group of men once stopped Bob Childress on a lonely road to tell him his time had come.
The preacher asked if he might pray first. When the men consented, he knelt in the dusty road and prayed so long they all walked away.
"He liked to say he prayed them right out of it," Bryan Childress said.
In later years, Bob Childress preached at six churches a week - sometimes preaching on Saturday nights, too, just to get to them all. Visiting his churches and congregations, he wore out a long line of cars on the rutted dirt roads of Floyd, Patrick and Carroll counties.
What he never did was quit.
He could have.
"He had a lot of enticing offers," said his son. "He felt these people needed him. And he could speak their language."
Childress encouraged young people to go to college - and they did. He encouraged hardened sinners to come to church - and such were his persuasive powers that they threw away their whiskey jars, and did.
For 30 years, he charmed, cajoled, stood up to and prayed for the people of Buffalo Mountain, those who knew him say.
Along the way, he built not only churches but a sawmill, to help create jobs. He fought for roads and bridges, to help bring his rugged pastorate into contact with the outside world.
In January, 1956, the 65-year-old preacher died, after ignoring the advice f doctors to slow down. He was buried on his 66th birthday.
If his work had finally killed him, he had finished it first.
In "The Man Who Moved a Mountain," Davids told the story of two grizzled mountaineers who lingered in the cemetery after Bob Childress' coffin was lowered into the ground.
"Now Bob Childress is gone," said one of them. "There just won't be another."
"There won't need to be," said his friend.