The Slate Mountain Presbyterian Church and Cemetery are prominently sited within Rock Castle Gap, on the Floyd County side of its border with Patrick County, near the Blue Ridge Parkway.  The church is one of the six Childress rock-faced churches located in the Virginia counties of Floyd, Carroll, and Patrick, built between 1919 and the early 1950s by Presbyterian minister Robert W. Childress. The six churches are significant in their embodiment of Appalachian patterns of Presbyterian religious worship and Presbyterian social activism in western Virginia. Slate Mountain Church began as a mission of Buffalo Mountain Church in 1930, operating in a one-room school in Floyd County. In 1932, the fieldstone church was built, after the Rev. Childress’s success with the local population. It was organized as an independent Presbyterian church in 1939.