Baptists have long area history

Of the 50-some churches listed on Stafford County maps today, at least 23 are Baptist.

Dennis Sacrey, president of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and historian for Fredericksburg Baptist Church, told the Stafford County Historical Society recently that was no surprise.

"Baptists like to start new churches," he said.

Speaking on "A Baptist Church for Falmouth," Sacrey said the Baptists' battle after they came from England to Virginia was to found a church in Fredericksburg. Some then broke free from it to establish Baptist churches in Stafford.

When the first permanent English settlers stepped ashore at Jamestown in 1607, their luggage included the Church of England. They had not fled their homeland because of religious persecution. They brought it with them, and they set out to convert anyone they met in the New World. It was not long before the colony's government established the Episcopal Church by law and supported it with a tax.

Baptists, who arrived in 1680, found they had fled persecution by the Church of England for a similar tyranny in America. Fredericksburg required them to get a license to preach. If they proselytized in public, they were arrested. There is a record from 1768 of five Baptists being scooped up for doing so in a city street. They were released by their jailers shortly afterward, "to get rid of them" because they tried to convert their cellmates.

The earliest record of a Baptist church in Stafford, Sacrey said, is of a chapel on what is now Holly Corner Road in the Horse Pen Run area, from 1713 to 1719. Another early church in Stafford was what is now White Oak Primitive Baptist Church, founded in Falmouth in 1789. It became a church for freed slaves after the Civil War.

Fredericksburg Baptist Church was founded in 1804, meeting first in a frame building on Lafayette Boulevard where the city's railroad station now stands, and in 1818 moving to what is now Shiloh Baptist Church (Old Site) on Sophia Street. At the same time, a dissident group organized a congregation in Falmouth.

1 2 Next Page

Not for nearly 170 years after Jamestown was settled would Virginia, and the new nation it helped found, declare freedom of religion for all. The Virginia Declaration of Rights, adopted in 1776, suspended the state-imposed tithes that had supported the church for more than 100 years.

In 1779, in Fredericksburg, Thomas Jefferson drafted the Statute for Religious Freedom, and while he was Virginia governor, in 1786, the General Assembly made it law.

Jefferson instructed that the statute be one of the three accomplishments inscribed on his tombstone--along with the Declaration of Independence and the founding of the University of Virginia.

Read more stories about Stafford
Date published: 3/9/2010

1. Be respectful. No personal attacks.
2. Please avoid offensive, vulgar, abusive, hateful or defamatory language.
3. Read and follow THE RULES.
4. We will block violaters and ban repeat offenders.

Breaking News - click here to have the latest delivered to your email box or cell phone