The Shadow
ALLEGHANY COUNTY, VA (VR) – The 66th Homecoming for Antioch Christian Church on Big Ridge will be held on Sunday, August 2, 2026. The Ranes and Fridley families will be organizing the reunion this year.
The program will begin at 10:30 a.m. with a time of sharing and reminiscing. At 11:00 a.m., the Morning Worship Service will begin and will include congregational singing, communion, and special music. The guest speaker will be Lewis Brooks, pastor of White Sulphur Springs Baptist Church and a longtime friend of the Ranes and Fridley families.
Those attending are invited to bring a covered dish and remain for the fellowship dinner following the morning service. Please bring a picnic blanket or lawn chair.
Antioch Christian Church can be reached by taking U.S. Route 311 to Alleghany, then Route 602 (Big Ridge Road), traveling five miles up the mountain to the church, which is located at the intersection of Routes 602 and 603.
The congregation known as Antioch Christian Church was organized by C.P. Ellison on September 6, 1915, in a schoolhouse on Big Ridge. Soon afterward, plans were made to construct a church building. Heze and Ellen Fridley donated the land. Building materials were prepared during the winter of 1916 and the early summer of 1917. Logs were donated by Byrd Burns and cut by Dan and V.V. Humphries. The 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 threshed. Corn had to be cut, shocked, and shucked; potatoes dug; apple butter made; chestnuts gathered; and molasses cane cut, ground, and boiled down into molasses. As a result, work on the church building was temporarily halted.
During a violent storm in late October, the wind lifted the partially completed building from its foundation. When the damage was discovered, word spread quickly. Such a catastrophe was regarded as a sign from the Lord that the building should 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 church’s first elder, organized a homecoming that has continued to be held on the first Sunday of August each year. In his history of Antioch Christian Church, Joseph M. Smith wrote 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 that lives within them as the most precious part of their heritage.”
