The log houses were ruggedly comfortable. As each house had in turn been built at a community log rolling, all exhibited a similarity of style and construction. Each was carefully and cozily built, had four rooms and an attic, a front and ell porch and two large sandstone chimneys. At the edge of the side porch was the well with its pole sweep and back of each house was a barn, the lower story of which was of stone and set in the hill-side, where possible. While to the casual observer these homes presented little apparent difference, individuality of ownership was perceptible in ornamentation as also prosperity or the reverse by the situation and fertility of the farm and the live stock in the farm yard and pastures. The church marked the center of the community and was the most pretentious building west of Blue Ridge. It was of hewn stone with a wooden roof and spire; and in the belfry hung a sweet-toned bell which Angus Cameron had brought from Scotland in 1758. There were two front doors; the one on the right for the men and the one on the left for the women; and between, extending from the front wall to within six feet of the pulpit, exactly bisecting the church, was a six foot partition, over or through which no one saw except some of the boys and possibly a girl or two; who during one of the regular two hour services each Sunday, had surreptitiously with jack-knife or gimlet or hair ornament, perforated it. By crowding, three hundred persons could find seats on the slab benches. They were filled to capacity each Sunday and some of the communicants and visitors rode more than fifteen miles rather than miss the meeting. When in 1759, Samuel Davies had preached the dedication sermon, more than five hundred had crowded it. All the settlers of the valley had attended as well as many from Blue Ridge, the Shenandoah and Greenaway Court. Now eleven years old, the church was looked upon as an ancient landmark and known throughout Virginia as the Jackson River Meeting House. More than once its doors had been closed in the name of the law, as enacted and administered by the Burgesses, most of whom were conformists. When this had happened Davies and other Scotch and Irish Presbyterian preachers and long and solemn faced ruling elders, refugees from Scotland and Ulster, Ireland, had gathered at Williamsburg; and so insistently and ably petitioned, that the easy-going planter delegates, worried by importunities; not only rashly promised their influence against further persecution, but legislation permitting to Presbyterians religious freedom throughout the colony. When the Baptists and Quakers learned of these promises, they demanded the same rights for themselves, but met with less favor.