The Shadow
The 62nd Homecoming for the Antioch Christian Church on Big Ridge will be held Sunday, August 7, 2022. The Hylton Family will be organizing the reunion this year.
The program will begin with a time of reminiscing at 10:30 by the 5th Generation Hyltons. 11:00 Morning Worship Service will include Congregational Singing; Communion; and Special Music. The Guest Speaker will be Dr. James Kelley, grandson of Posey and Lora Hylton and son of W. Ray and Shirley Hylton Kelley. His message will be titled “Ordinary People”.
Those attending are invited to bring a covered dish and remain for the fellowship dinner that follows the morning services.
Antioch Christian Church can be reached by car by taking US 311 to Alleghany, then Rt. 602 Big Ridge Road, five miles up the mountain to the church located at the intersection of Rt. 602 and Rt. 603.
The congregation known as the Antioch Christian Church was organized by C.P. Ellison on September 6, 1915, in a schoolhouse on Big Ridge. Soon afterward they began to plan for a building. Heze and Ellen Fridley donated the land. The building materials were prepared during the winter of 1916 and early summer of 1917. Logs were donated by Byrd Burns and cut by Dan and V.V. Humphries. These logs were hauled to Bob Feury’s sawmill on Tuckahoe by W.P. McDaniel and C.C. Smith.
The building was nearly completed by late summer when the crops had to be harvested. Wheat, which had been shocked in the fields, had to be brought in and thrashed. Corn had to be cut, shocked and shucked; potatoes dug; apple butter made; chestnuts gathered; molasses cane, cut, ground and the juice boiled down into molasses. Thus work on the church building was halted.
During a violent storm late in October, the wind lifted the partially completed building from its foundation. When discovered, the word spread quickly. Such a catastrophe was taken as a work from the Lord that the building must be completed without delay.
On November 11, 1917, H.D. Coffey, a well-known preacher in Alleghany County and state evangelist for the Virginia Christian Missionary Society, dedicated the new building. Regular services continued to be held at Antioch Christian Church until 1959-60.
In 1961, the late William Carl Smith, a son of the first elder, organized a homecoming, which has continued to be held on the first Sunday of August each year. Joseph M. Smith in his history of Antioch Christian Church writes of the gathering: “On the first Sunday in August of each year, the children of Big Ridge gather to celebrate — not a dead past — but a present which lives within them as the most precious part of their heritage.”
