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The renovated 1892 Golgotha Church (today) once housed the first permanent
Frank Tyler was Sunday School superintendent at
The Golgotha Church originally had flanking front doors The front of the Union Church in Falmouth. It was the only Baptist church in Falmouth for most of the 19th century. |
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.
Falmouth was a clear choice for a new church. It was the competitor to Fredericksburg, both seeking to become major ports. The attraction in Falmouth was the new Union Church, built in 1819 and so named because it became home, on a rotating basis, to services for Methodists, Presbyterians, Episcopalians and Baptists.
Meanwhile, Fredericksburg Baptist Church continued to expand, and by the 1840s claimed more than 800 members, nearly three-fourths of them slaves and free blacks. African-Americans were inclined to attend the Baptist church regardless of where their owners went, Sacrey said. The Sophia Street church was eventually sold to the black congregants, and the white congregation bought a site at Princess Anne and Amelia streets. A new building was completed in 1855 and is the anchor of the expanded facility there today.
Civil War abolitionist tensions led to 24 members being dismissed from the Fredericksburg church, some shifting to Falmouth. Then the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, and subsequent military actions, seriously damaged the Fredericksburg building, forcing the church to essentially shut down from 1862 to the end of the war, in 1865. In the decades that followed, it helped send preachers to hold the Falmouth Baptists together.
In 1891, Sacrey said, a group of about 30 Baptists brought about the construction of the first permanent Baptist church in Falmouth, with 100 members, which remains a landmark on Cambridge Street today. Now known as Golgotha Church, it was sold in 1955 and the Falmouth Baptists built the first section of their present two-wing facility just up the hill, on Colonial Avenue at Butler Road.
Home at last.
Hugh Muir: 540/735-1975
Email: hmuir@freelancestar.com
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.
