The Whitmore Schoolhouse, originally located on Upper Cove Run Road in Hardy County, West Virginia, served as the meetinghouse for the Cove Mennonite Church from 1954 to 1997. Charles and Alice Hartman gave longtime leadership to the Sunday school, and Linden and Esther Wenger provided part-time pastoral leadership in the congregation’s later years following their retirement.
When Mathias Mennonite Church was organized in 1973 from a merger of nearby congregations, the Cove group did not initially join because of the distance to the new central location. Cove member Bertha Halterman noted that families lived close enough to walk to Cove and would not travel elsewhere if the church closed. The congregation continued meeting at Whitmore for another twenty-four years.
In 1997, the Northern District of the Virginia Mennonite Conference, working with Cove’s leadership, decided to discontinue the program and merge the congregation with Mathias Mennonite Church.
The Whitmore Schoolhouse itself — a rare example of a building that served both as a one-room school and a place of worship — found new life through preservation. In 2004, volunteers carefully disassembled the 20-by-23-foot building into three sections, transported it to the Brethren & Mennonite Heritage Center campus in Harrisonburg, and reassembled it on a new foundation. The bell tower, front porch, and rear classroom were reattached. Today the building hosts school groups, tour buses, and individual visitors who come to learn about Mennonite and Brethren history in the Shenandoah Valley — and about education in a one-room schoolhouse.