Under a big tent, LCF to celebrate

Herb Moore likes to tell a story that says a lot about the Lynchburg Covenant Fellowship.

“One day in 1975,” Moore said, “four or five of us on the board were having lunch at Lum’s, over on Memorial, and someone happened to mention that the old Western Hotel was No. 1 on the city’s demolition list. Somebody asked who owned it, and someone else said they thought it was Bruton Langley. And that was the extent of the conversation.

“No one had said anything about visiting the place, and we all just left and drove away in different cars. Five minutes later, we all showed up at the Western Hotel.”

The place had seen better days since it operated as Nichols Tavern on the old stage road through town, and most of the windows were broken and boarded up. The LCF contingent found one that was boardless, however, and crawled through the empty pane.

“We thought, we can’t let this great old building be torn down,” Moore recalled. “So we bought it from Bruton Langley for, I think it was, $7,600.”

The Western Hotel, rechristened the Nichols Tavern, became first a dinner theater and now houses the Festival Center, offering youth and community programs to the neighborhood around Fifth and Madison.

That was just the beginning. To borrow the currently popular phrase, LCF has stepped softly in Lynchburg but left a very large footprint. Long before the practice of rehabbing and restoring old buildings became popular here, this small band of dreamers and risk-takers was turning two abandoned schools and a moribund fraternal hall into low-income apartment buildings.

In the process, LCF enlisted the aid not only of national-class architect Kirk Noyes of Gloucester, Mass., but the legendary Jim Rouse, developer of the nation’s first planned community in Columbia, Md.

This year, LCF turns 59, and it was decided to celebrate by honoring the five surviving members of its first board — Gordon Cosby, Kathleen Gordon Cosby, P.G. Cosby, Ida Gordon Cosby and Mildred Edmunds. The organization was started as Lynchburg Christian Fellowship, primarily to launch a day camp for kids off Boonsboro Road. And it is on that property, purchased from the Edmunds family, that a large tent will be set up for Saturday night’s dinner.

Despite the preponderance of Cosbys, a significant Cosby will be missing. Bev Cosby, the first pastor of the Church of the Covenant (an LCF spinoff), died in 2002. Irma Seiferth, a prime mover in another spinoff, Interfaith Outreach, passed away earlier this year.

Nevertheless, Moore remains confident that new blood is pumping through the organization, which was renamed Lynchburg Covenant Fellowship in 1973 to include the city’s Jewish community. The Church of the Covenant still has its services in the living room of what used to be the Edmunds house. The adjoining garage was long ago converted into the Lodge of the Fisherman, where the Rev. Martin Luther King once broke bread with LCF members.

Gordon and Kathleen Cosby will come down from Washington to be honored; Mildred Edmunds and Ida Cosby will arrive from Florida.

“For entertainment, David Edwards (current Church of the Covenant pastor) is going to sing and Bill Harris is going to do magic,” Moore said.

How appropriate. Lynchburg Covenant Fellowship has been performing magic for almost 60 years.