A History of Faith Mission Home
by Kay Collins Chretien
Originally published August 18-August 24, 1999 issue
of the Charlottesville Area Real Estate Weekly, p. 37
Submitted by: Norm Addington norm1394@gmail.com
Permission to reprint granted 1 Sep 1999 by Kay Collins Chretien.
Route 601 in the very northwest part of Albemarle crosses a saddle ridge of the mountains before it goes into Greene County. Perched on that saddle, high in the leading edge of the Blue Ridge is Faith Mission Home. Today a mission of the Mennonite Church, most area people recognize the name form the home-made-style baked goods, that are sold in local stores.
This settlement of buildings will celebrate its one hundredth birthday shortly after the turn of the twenty-first century, and it has continuously served the purpose of caring for others during that long history.
Mission Home was conceived and built by the Episcopal minister, Frederick Neve, shortly after the turn of the twentieth century. It was built as part of a network of missions, situated approximately every ten miles or so, high up in the Blue Ridge Mountains, to serve the families that lived and farmed in these then quite remote areas. It was still the days of horse transportation, and there were no paved roads—in fact, much of the access to these mountain homes were little more than paths that wended their way back into the hollows.
Archdeacon Neve, (as he was later to be known), had come to the United States from his native England shortly after his graduation from Oxford and his ordination as an Episcopal priest. Expressing a desire to do his work perhaps in Canada or some other locale outside of England, Neve had been made aware of a request for a rector that had been sent to his superiors in England from a tiny church in Ivy, Virginia. Neve applied, and was accepted.
It wasn't long before parishioners began to tell Neve of the mountain people living in the Blue Ridge, and how they had little, or difficult, access to churches, schools or medical treatment. Neve soon traveled into the hollows to see for himself.
One of the members of the church owned property at Simmon's Gap just above Shifflett's Hollow, where he kept cattle. The families living up there worked for him taking care of the livestock, and they had expressed a wish for a school. They also offered the use of two empty cabins—one for a school house, and the other for the teacher to live in.
Neve saw this as an opportunity to expand his ministry, and advertised in The Southern Churchman for a teacher, emphasizing the isolation and lack of amenities, hoping that a young man would respond. Instead, he received applications from fifteen young women, and finally selected Angelina Fitzhugh. ( See her picture below) She became one of many young women and a few men to teach the mountain families at the missions.
Thus began in 1900 what would become the focus of Neve's work, resulting by 1910 in a total of twenty-eight missions and sixteen schools.
Shortly after starting the mission schools, it became apparent to Neve that they needed to be divided up into “districts” for administrative purposes, and that the teachers really needed to be provided with a communal home in each district. Located centrally, teachers and other workers could live at the home and go to the schools and missions each day from there. Thus, Mission Home was one of the first built, (circa 1903), located where several roads and paths into the mountains converged with a road leading into Charlottesville.
Land was purchased from Razzie Shifflett for $350, which included two cabins, one recently built an the other one much older. Plans were made to erect a chapel dedicated to the late Bishop Whittle of Virginia with funds provided by the Diocesan Auxiliary—and the erection of the mission home with funds donated by a Richmond woman, Mrs. F.H. McGuire, in memory of her late husband.
It was apparent from the beginning that this would not be an easy undertaking. Building materials had to be brought in from Charlottesville, some twenty-five miles distant and Neve's assistant, George Mayo, became construction foreman, using local men, after local contractors put in bids double the normal price because of the location. Eventually the frame Whittle Memorial chapel and the two-story, large frame house with its wide verandah were completed. The older cabin was torn down, and the newer one became St. Hilda's School.
The school cabin was soon replaced with a larger structure, with two school rooms on the first floor and a large meeting space on the second floor. The small cabin became a used clothing store.
Frederick Neve's vision and purpose to assist the mountain people was well known outside of this area, and even outside of Virginia—it was supported by fund-raisers held in places such as New York City, such as one hosted by Nancy Astor on a visit back to the United States.
It was in the mid-1920's that another English native moved to this part of Virginia. Anne Park started a small clinic connected to the St. Steven's Episcopal Mission in Yancey Mills in 1926, then moved it to the Mission Home complex in 1928. She occupied what had been built in 1909 as a large rectory for the minister. The small clinic now had been rechristened as the “St. Anne's Preventorium for Rebuilding Children.”
There were accommodations in the frame building for resident facilities for fifteen girls who were recovering from chronic illnesses and conditions such as tuberculosis and malnutrition, and it became the only hospital facility for the mountain families for miles around. Unfortunately, it burned to the ground in 1930, but Neve was determined not only to rebuild, but to enlarge the facilities.
The cornerstone for the large stone building was laid the following year, and when finished, it could accommodate a total of thirty, with both a boys' and girls' wing. Dedicated in 1932, much of the work had again been done by the mountain people it served. No fees were ever charged for the care dispensed there.
After Park resigned for health reasons in the late 1940's, it was operated as a hospital for handicapped children.
As with so many other aspects, the coming of the Shenandoah National Park, changed the mountain peoples' lives forever, and with it the reason for the missions and schools that Neve had built along the Blue Ridge. By 1933 only two of the schools were still in existence, one up from Mission Home on Lost Mountain, and the Blue Ridge School near Dyke, which still exists. The people had been largely moved from their remote homesteads, and the counties had taken more responsibility for the education of all resident children, not just those near the more populated areas.
The Mission Home location was saved from being taken as park area with efforts from then United States Senator Harry F. Byrd, as well as the Department of Sociology at the University of Virginia.
In 1965, Mission Home was purchased by the Mennonite denomination, to create a facility for mentally challenged children, and renamed Faith Mission Home. The physically disabled children from the Preventorium had been moved many years earlier to Bloomfield and became the nucleus for that privately owned facility.
Faith Mission Home purchased additional land, added necessary buildings and enlarged the main stone building for its purposes.
Archdeacon Neve's vision and purpose is continuing today with Faith Mission Home which utilizes the site and some of the original buildings with the same concern to serve those in need. It is also gratifying to see the complex growing rather than shrinking and thriving from its efforts, ready to step into the new millennium.
In its lovely setting up in the Blue Ridge, with its breathtaking vistas, the only direction those spirits that live there can soar, is up.
See Also: St. Stephen's Mission
"A History of Faith Mission Home" |
This page is part of the Shiflet Family Genealogy Website and is maintained by:
Julia Crosswell / Fort Worth, TX / 1998 - 2006Robert Klein / Pasadena, MD / 2008 - present