Mt. Nebo Church

Mt. Nebo Church was founded shortly after the Civil War in 1867, when a Northerner named Mr. Rickets bought this place in the woods, then called Oak Hill, and began preaching to a group of African American people. As people from surrounding communities came to hear him, they built a brush arbor for worship, and when the crowd grew, Mr. Rickets gave the congregation one acre of land on which they built a log church and named it Mt. Nebo. P.F. Fitzgerald, a young man born in Mississippi and sold as an enslaved person in Virginia, told the congregation that if they would pay for his education, he would preach to them for the rest of his life, and after they found the money, he kept his promise and became the Rev. P.F. Fitzgerald, the first pastor of Mt. Nebo. People came from near and far to join the church, leading to a new building funded by a march in which everyone was asked to give 25 cents, and as the congregation continued to grow and organized a Sunday school, a third structure was built and still stands. In 1967 Mt. Nebo celebrated its centennial, and the congregation worshiped in its third building until 1978, when it moved to a new edifice across the road, where Mt. Nebo schoolhouses also stood, including a two-room schoolhouse that remained until the 1970s.

Virginia · United States