Old Salem Church was the only United Brethren church that the anti-slavery denomination opened within the Confederacy during the Civil War. Built in 1833 on the northeastern side of Green Hill along Joes Creek northwest of Edom as Green Hill Methodist Episcopal Meeting House, it was bought from the Methodists in 1863 by local members of the United Brethren in Christ for $500 and moved to a rocky field on the Abraham Rolston farm about one-and-a-half miles north of Singers Glen on present-day Turleytown Road. Virginia Bishop J.J. Glossbrenner brought window glass from West Virginia through Federal lines, and the relocated building was dedicated on December 27, 1863, as Salem United Brethren in Christ Church. William J. Miller, a local preacher and miller, helped organize Salem Church, and John W. Howe, the United Brethren preacher assigned to Rockingham County, also helped organize the church and held it together during the war. Hiram Brown, a later owner of the property, was told that soldiers quartered their horses in the church. Old Salem became the mother church of at least five other United Brethren congregations, including Singers Glen, Cherry Grove, and several churches in the Brocks Gap area. Late in the 1880s, the United Brethren abandoned the deteriorated building, after which Cooks Creek Presbyterian Church used it as a mission site early in the 1900s, and during most of the twentieth century it served as a barn and stable on the Hiram and Robert Brown farm.