About 1790, Daniel Garber, his brother-in-law, John Flory, and their families moved from Shenandoah County to Rockingham County, Southwest of Harrisonburg. They came to provide leadership to a developing group of Brethren who were settling in that area. The congregation came to be known as Cooks Creek, as many Brethren congregations were named for the waterways where they performed baptisms. They built a frame meetinghouse in 1822 on land that had belonged to Daniel Garber, so it was known as the Garbers meetinghouse of the Cooks Creek congregation. Prior to the construction of this meetinghouse, most Brethren in the Shenandoah Valley met for worship and church business in homes, but this building became the first in a wave of Brethren meetinghouses built in the decades afterward.
The meetinghouse was remodeled in 1907, 1927, 1948, and 1959, and by these efforts to modify the existing building, it remains the oldest meetinghouse still in use by a Brethren congregation in the Valley. In 1971, a brick fellowship hall was built next to the old building to provide additional space for activities.
When the Cooks Creek congregation divided into three separate congregations around different meetinghouses in 1966, the group that remained at the Garbers meetinghouse stopped using the Cooks Creek name, and the congregation has been known as Garbers Church of the Brethren since then.
The old cemetery for this congregation is a half-mile East of the meetinghouse in the woods. It can be reached by walking from the end of pavement of Hidden Creek Ln to the other side of the power lines.
Contributed by Jonathan B. Scarr
Sources
- Many lines come directly from Shenandoah District of the Church of the Brethren in “Middle River Celebrates 200 Years of Ministry” in Sharing Our Story, Mar. 13, 2024.
- Roger E. Sappington, The Brethren in Virginia (1973).