Buckhorn Mennonite Church began in 1930 when itinerant ministers invited people to gather and hear preaching in the local public schoolhouse. For forty-three years, Buckhorn church served a remote highlands community in Hardy County, West Virginia. In 1973, Buckhorn merged with nearby Cove, Cullers Run, and Mt. Hermon to form Mathias Mennonite Church, an MC USA congregation in the Virginia Conference.
Young adults from Trissels, Zion, and Lindale congregations followed their ministers into the highlands, teaching Summer Bible School and Sunday school during the ‘30s and ‘40s. Maude Geil (Lantz), twenty-one, taught Bible School at Buckhorn in 1940. During the day, Maude instructed children in the schoolhouse or outside, and she stayed overnight in a tent or a trailer that Northern District business people supplied for the two-week Summer Bible School sessions.
Young adults like Maude Geil, Robert Alger, Kathryn V. Showalter (Shank), and Linden Wenger supportively drove to Buckhorn, about thirty miles north of Broadway, Va., to teach and encourage the folks in this remote region. Dozens of Virginia Conference young adults taught Summer Bible School in the highlands during the ‘30s and ‘40s.
A small Mennonite community emerged at Buckhorn in the 1930s, with ministers on a preaching calendar coming to the schoolhouse about once a month for worship services. During winter, services didn’t always occur because of impassable roads. But there was a cycle of annual communion services and occasional baptisms when a bishop came to lead the service.
Buckhorn was among two dozen Northern District congregations that emerged in the early twentieth century missions awakening, the work of Virginia Conference itinerant ministers in the highlands of Virginia and West Virginia. Mennonite youth followed, like Helen Trumbo (Shank), who, at 17-18 years of age, taught five Bible School sessions of two weeks each during one summer in the early 1940s.
In 1948 the small Mennonite congregation in Buckhorn asked District ministers to help them build a meetinghouse. In May 1949, Bishop Timothy Showalter preached a dedication sermon for the new cinderblock building. Mennonite evangelist William Jennings, from a Virginia Conference congregation in Tennessee, followed with revival meetings at the church.
During the 1930s and ‘40s, dozens of young adults in Virginia Conference taught Summer Bible School in the highlands. At the same time, city mission churches began, prompted by dynamic mission energy. Further, missionary speakers from India, Africa, and South America helped Virginia Mennonites see beyond their home-based mission efforts. In one remote mountain setting, however, at Buckhorn Mennonite Church, near the Lost River State Park, Mathias, W.Va., Conference ministers and lay workers helped build a congregation during a several-decade season of Holy Spirit-inspired mission.
