The Polegreen Story

From Virginia’s founding at Jamestown in 1607 until the American Revolution, the Anglican Church was the only officially recognized church, supported by tax money while other religious groups were discouraged, suppressed, or harassed. After the Great Awakening took hold in Virginia in the late 1730s, energized in part by the preaching of Rev. George Whitefield, Samuel Morris began gathering family and neighbors in Hanover County to read the Bible and religious tracts, helping launch a dissenter movement around the Polegreen site, named for landowner George Polegreen. In 1747 the Hanover Dissenters received the 23-year-old Presbyterian minister Samuel Davies, who became the first non-Anglican minister licensed by the Governor’s Council to preach in Virginia and served at the Polegreen Meetinghouse until 1759. Davies contributed to the colony’s religious and political life through educational efforts, including teaching enslaved men and women and white indentured servants to read the Bible, and he is also credited as the first American-born hymn writer. A young Patrick Henry worshipped at Polegreen with his mother Sarah and later credited Davies with shaping his idea of what an orator should be; Henry went on to become a leading voice of the American Revolution and the first Governor of independent Virginia. For more than a century Polegreen Church stood as a symbol of the Hanover Dissenters’ struggle for civil and religious freedom, but during the Civil War in 1864 it lay between Union and Confederate forces during Ulysses S. Grant’s attempt to break through Robert E. Lee’s lines along Totopotomoy Creek. After Union troops occupied the church, Confederate artillery fired on it, and according to artilleryman William S. White, a shot he fired set the church ablaze on June 1, 1864; it was never rebuilt.

Virginia · United States