New Hope Baptist Church holds a remarkable place in the story behind the beloved Christmas hymn “I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day.” During the Mine Run Campaign of the Civil War in November 1863, fighting swept across the area surrounding New Hope Church, and the church building was used as a field hospital for wounded soldiers. Among those treated there was Charles “Charley” Longfellow, son of renowned poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, who had been seriously wounded in battle nearby. Just weeks later, on Christmas Day 1863, Longfellow—still grieving the death of his wife, witnessing a nation divided by war, and carrying the anguish of his son’s near-fatal wound—wrote the poem “Christmas Bells.” Though he struggled with how the promise of “peace on earth” could survive amid such suffering, the poem ultimately proclaimed a message of enduring Christian hope: “God is not dead, nor doth He sleep; the Wrong shall fail, the Right prevail, with peace on earth, good-will to men.” The poem would later become the Christmas hymn we know today, forever giving New Hope a small but extraordinary connection to one of America’s most enduring songs of faith and hope.