Restoration Begins on Historic John Wesley ME Church, Unveiled on Juneteent

Restoration Begins on Historic John Wesley ME Church, Unveiled on Juneteenth

By Danny Cardwell

Bath County unveiled the restoration project for the historic John Wesley ME Church on Friday, June 19 — Juneteenth — marking the start of a renovation that will turn the 1873 church into the Museum of West Warm Springs and Meeting House.

I remember a time when there were seven African American churches scattered across this county. Today there are two. Piney Grove Baptist Church is the only one still holding services every week. Mount Pisgah, the oldest African American church in Bath County, holds services twice a month.

The numbers didn’t shrink because the faith did. They shrank because the people did. Over the past forty years, young people have left Bath County looking for opportunities the county couldn’t offer, and that loss has hit African American families and churches harder than most.

For the last several decades, the John Wesley ME Church building didn’t sit empty — it became home to the Valley Program for Aging Services (VPAS), which used the space to serve Bath County’s older residents. But VPAS has since moved to a new location, and the building they leave behind is now set to become something new: not just a museum, but a meeting house and gathering space for the community that built it.

So when a sign was unveiled on the restoration of the John Wesley ME Church on Juneteenth — it wasn’t quite a groundbreaking, since the building never left: it wasn’t just a renovation project starting. It was a question being answered, at least for one building: who is this space for, and does it still have a life left in it.

The answer, on a clear Friday morning in June, was yes.

The Ceremony

The gathering on West Warm Springs Drive opened with prayer from Deacon Oscar Beale, who thanked God “for yet another day” and asked for blessings over those gathered. What followed was a short, informal program. As Terry Ammons, the architect leading the restoration through Studio Ammons, put it, “it’s not really groundbreaking because the building’s already there.” Instead, the morning centered on an unveiling of the project sign that will stand at the site through construction — which notes the museum and meeting house is expected to open in 2027.

Perlista Henry, who has lived next door to the church her entire life, opened with the church’s history. “For me, it will always be holy ground,” she said. She traced the building back to right after the Civil War, when the community that would build John Wesley worshiped at Warm Springs Presbyterian Church and in open fields before they were able to raise their own sanctuary in 1873.

She placed the church’s roots within the broader history of Bath County’s enslaved population: “There were 946 slaves in this county in 1865, and that’s not counting the 25 or so who were free.” It’s a figure she repeated in two separate conversations during the day — once during the program, once in a one-on-one interview — underscoring how central that number is to how she understands the building’s significance.

Henry also described a community that once shared its faith across denominational lines: John Wesley held Methodist services on the first and third Sundays, while Baptist services filled the other two. “Sunday school was wherever there was service that day,” she said, “and even our dogs knew to come to church.”

The Restoration

Ammons gave the project’s technical details. The building is a log structure that was clad in siding in 1923 — the same year it received its bell tower and choir additions — and has had little done to it since. “It’s pretty much the way it was in 1923,” Ammons said. Underneath a newer red cloth covering the chancel rail, restoration crews found the original chancel cloth still intact.

The building has settled over the decades, with water damage affecting the stone foundation the log structure rests on. Ammons said the project has been awarded a grant from the Virginia Department of Historic Resources that will fund the restoration of the historic church building itself, though additional work on the fellowship hall and surrounding site will require further funding.

Ammons said the goal is to hold a ribbon-cutting ceremony on Juneteenth next year. “If not, the church has a couple other birthdays that give us maybe a couple of months extra,” he said. The project sign unveiled at the ceremony lists 2027 as the target completion date.

Asked what success looks like five years from now, Ammons didn’t describe a finished building so much as a used one: “Families are using it. Families are coming back here. We’re preserving stories from the community,” he said, describing a vision where the museum’s work connects Bath County’s African American history to “other African American stories throughout the valley and through this whole region.”

Who It’s For

Bath County Board of Supervisors member Roy Burns offered brief remarks, calling the project the product of “over 25 years” of persistence by multiple people and organizations, and asking the crowd for a round of applause for those who pushed it forward.

Beth Bland, representing VPAS, described the moment as “humbling” and credited the project’s original vision to a former VPAS executive director. She was direct about VPAS’s continuing role: while the new nonprofit being formed — the Museum of West Warm Springs — works toward its own 501(c)(3) status, VPAS is serving as the financial entity managing the grant on the project’s behalf. “We may be moving from this space,” Bland said, “but we are not moving away from this community.”

For Rhonda Beale, a member of both Piney Grove Baptist and Mount Pisgah grew up attending Sunday school at John Wesley on alternating weeks, the project’s significance is straightforward. “It makes me feel really good that something’s being done in the community,” she said, “and this church and this building is not going to go down. It’s still gonna be part of this community.” Asked what she hopes the space becomes, Beale pointed to its future as a gathering place — for reunions, meetings, and visitors coming to learn the history of West Warm Springs.

Joan Williams, like many in this community, splits her church life between Piney Grove Baptist and Mount Pisgah. She recalled first arriving in Bath County as a 19-year-old, when her father came to serve as a supply pastor at John Wesley. Her family had been living in Boones Mill, Virginia, when the call came; he was asked to preach until the church found a permanent minister, and what was meant to be a short stay stretched from the third Sunday in October to the following June.

Williams described the drive to Bath County in pouring rain, and then coming over Warm Springs Mountain to find the sun breaking through and the valley below in full bloom. “I said, ‘Daddy, I’m gonna live here,’” she said. “Oh, it was breathtaking.” She remembers the community itself the same way — “everyone was so kind,” she said of the months her family spent there.

Decades later, watching the church bell ring again during the ceremony brought her to tears. “I haven’t heard those bells ring in a long time,” she said. “It just touched me.”

Ammons, reflecting on why buildings like this matter regardless of religious affiliation, put it this way: “These buildings belong to communities… Communities feel that they own those buildings. Those buildings represent them.” For a community where, he noted, most families have scattered and no single house is large enough to host a reunion, the restored building offers something practical as much as symbolic — a place to come back to.

For Perlista Henry, who has spent much of her life documenting this history, the building’s next chapter is simple to define. It should be, she said, “a depository of the stories, and the records, and the photographs of this community, and the African American community at large in this county.”

The Project

The restoration of the John Wesley ME Church and the future Museum of West Warm Springs and Meeting House is made possible by:

• Virginia Department of Historic Resources
• Valley Program for Aging Services (VPAS)
• The County of Bath
• Preservation Bath
• Studio Ammons