Community Outreach & Education:

During the interim years between listing the chapel and cemetery on the state and national registers and restoring the building, the Longs Chapel Preservation Society (LCPS) reached out to the local community to inform people about the history and significance of Longs Chapel and Zenda. These efforts included hiring local historian and writer Nancy Bondurant Jones to research and author a book titled Zenda: 1869-1930, An African American Community of Hope. LCPS donated hundreds of copies of the book to area schools for teachers to use in the classroom; it also promoted and sold the book to raise awareness about Zenda. (Proceeds from book sales also helped to fund the chapel's renovation.)
   Meanwhile, Al Jenkins regularly spoke to church groups, clubs, civic and historical organizations, and visited history classes at Eastern Mennonite University, as well as other venues in the central Shenandoah Valley, to relay the story of Zenda and Longs Chapel.
   Here a group from EMU’s International Student Exchange program tours the building circa 2006 (bottom photo), and a tour affiliated with the Frontier Culture Museum is shown in 2008—just some of the scores of people who have visited the site in recent years.