This clipping shows that Bishop Garber probably was one of the founders of the church. His wife was a Miller. He settled in Augusta County, Va., time not known, secured a tract of land near the church, and there reared a family of fifteen children. He undoubtedly was buried in the Middle River Churchyard, but as the wooden crosses at the graves have crumbled beyond reading the names painted on them, this cannot be verified. It could have been ascertained through the records of the Church had there been any, but the Dunkard Church never kept accurate records nor paid its preachers.

Levi Garber's old German Bible in the possession of his grandson, Christian Coffman, containing a page that was partly torn away, held intact the date of birth of the son that was the founder of this Garber line in Iowa, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. There is a traditon that the founder of this family sailed from Hamburg to America from a certain canton in Switzerland where live many Garbers.

Every Garber in Virginia was a property owner. But it has remained for the Oklahoma Garbers to secure vast fortunes through the development of oil fields. The Garbers in these Western States have been business men, professional men, mostly lawyers and merchants of some line, with a few bankers. They have lost their identity with the Dunkard Church and transferred their community activities to some line of politics in connection with their private business.

The Garbers of Virginia were never slave owners. They were plain folk dominated by sterling principles of justice, honesty, and the brotherhood of man. Their church tenets forbad their fighting in the army with guns but their voices rang with no uncertain sound in unison with Abraham Lincoln through all the dark days of the Civil War, in a part of Virginia where it was almost suicidal to proclaim the Union cause. For the most part the very fierceness of their denunciation of the principles of slavery from their pulpits and from public platforms proved their immunity from persecution, but occasionally some of them would be compelled to hide in the mountains or travel to West Virginia, Kentucky, or to the mountain regions of the Carolinas where they preached the gospel of freedom as they rode on horseback from congregation to congregation and helped direct the work of the "Underground Railroad" as it was called in that region.

One known as "Cousin Sam" was a powerful Dunkard preacher and "Union" organizer who held many notable debates throughout these States, and even in the State of Iowa. He has been credited with the discovering to the country of Andrew Johnson, second Vice-President with President Lincoln, and it was the grief of "Cousin Sam's" last years that Johnson turned out to be a "politician" instead of the "sterling Unionist" he was supposed to be. Sheridan's Raid of the Shenandoah Valley was one of the outcomes of their tireless efforts to "win the war for freedom" and the Middle River Dunkard Church community was not far from the line of Sheridan's Raid when he crossed the Middle Fork of the Shenandoah on his way to Staunton, and swept all the organized forces of the Confederate Army from the Valley.