Gospel Chicken House ends a 37-year run

They started arriving four hours before the service began, filling the hand-me-down church pews and theater seats, talking and laughing and crying at the thought of never coming to this place again.

The Gospel Chicken House, which at one time was, yes, a place where chickens resided, officially holds about 300 people, but by the time the music started Saturday evening, the gathering might have topped 400. People stood along the walls and spilled into the back hallway toward the kitchen.

No one who had come to love the Chicken House during the past 37 years of Saturday nights as a down-home place of worship and fellowship or as simply a place to listen to good music and eat good food wanted to miss this if they could help it.

Everyone wanted to say goodbye to Ray Pollard.

And to the Chicken House.

Pollard, 89, died Jan. 4, and, in a way, the Chicken House went with him.

"It's hard to imagine it's not going to be here, but without Mother and Dad it just wouldn't be the same," Jane Williams said of her father and mother, Mary, who died in 2008. "They were the Chicken House. I don't believe God intended it to go any longer without them. It was just time."

So, Williams, who used to gather eggs in the hen house as a child, decided to end the Saturday shows and move back into the nearby farmhouse where she grew up.

"This is home," she said after Saturday's service.

Over the years, the Chicken House has become a spiritual home to many, many others, and for them the final night was bittersweet and more than a little sad.

"Oh, it's terrible," said Harry Melton, who with his wife, Virginia, has been a regular since Ray Pollard opened the place in 1973. "We're lost on Saturday nights if we don't get up here."

Said Jackie Adams, who still recalls the warm welcome the Pollards gave her when she showed up 10 years ago and who now manages the Chicken House website and Facebook page, "This is my church. The ministry will go on in our hearts forever."

Many of the volunteers vowed to continue the music and fellowship that were hallmarks of what was believed to be the nation's longest-running weekly gospel sing. Instead of the Chicken House, their venue will become nursing homes, churches and other places.

"The Chicken House will not die because the Chicken House is the people," said longtime emcee Vicki Bruce. "We will just go into the mission field in our little areas and sing and do what we can, and we'll keep it alive."

The Chicken House began in 1973, almost by accident, when Ray Pollard cleaned up the henhouse that was no longer in use to give his gospel quartet a place to practice on Saturday nights. A few dozen people showed up to listen, and a tradition was born. Admission was always free. The sale of barbecue and homemade cakes and pies paid the light bill. An offering plate was passed to pay the expenses of performers.

In the early days, the floor was dirt, and there are stories of feathers floating around. But many came to believe, as Maryann Lockett did, that this was "holy ground."

"I have never felt like God led me anywhere as much as He did here," said Lockett, who happily made the 75-mile round-trip each week from her home in Midlothian.

Clayton Custalow, a frequent performer at the Chicken House since the 1970s, spoke for many when he described this low-slung, unpretentious building off a quiet country road in western Hanover County as "a phenomenon."

Over the years, thousands upon thousands of people came through its doors, and thousands more who never set foot in the place surely benefited from positive encounters with someone who had.

Saturday's service was heavy on music and light on words, which is just the way Pollard would have wanted it. He was a shy but friendly man who liked to say God was the owner of the place and he just the janitor.

"He didn't like a lot of talking," said Bruce, his close friend of 30 years. "He always said he'd rather see a sermon than hear one any day."

After the service, the crowd lingered and chatted and hugged as the Gospel Chicken House Band played on. Photos that told the story of the Chicken House were removed from the walls and given to anyone who wanted them. Ralph Chilton clutched a couple of pictures that included him, one from the 1970s of a group called the Firetower Quartet that included Ray Pollard. Chilton met his wife, Linda, at the Chicken House in May 1976, and they married later that year. The band played "Will the Circle Be Unbroken."

As this loose-knit congregation went out into the cold night and the grassy field slowly emptied of cars and trucks, the Chicken House was left alone, glowing, the long rows of windows on either side letting the light of the place out into the rest of the world.

Inside, Donald and Ronald Lineberry, twin brothers who live not a mile down the road and were among the most loyal of volunteers, were just about done with their work. Donald ran the soundboard, and Ronald oversaw the kitchen. They were stalwarts at the Chicken House for almost 27 years, having been introduced to it by their mother, Marie, who just before she died in 1999 made her sons promise they would stay with the Chicken House.

"We promised her on her death bed we would stay here," recalled Donald. "We fulfilled our promise to our mother and to Ray and Mary."

wlohmann@timesdispatch

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