Polegreen Church

For more than a century Polegreen Church stood as a monument to the Hanover Dissenters and Samuel Davies in the struggle for religious liberty. Although Davies died fifteen years before the American Revolution, his influence and revolutionary spirit were embodied in Patrick Henry, whose mother Sarah and grandfather Isaac Winston were active dissenters in the congregation and worshipped here during the twelve years of Davies’s ministry after his arrival in 1747, when Henry was eleven years old. Patrick Henry, ironically named for an uncle who was rector of the Anglican parish of St. Paul’s at Old Church in Hanover County, Virginia, was shaped by Davies’s powerful preaching; Sarah Henry had her son repeat the sermons on the carriage ride home to Studley Plantation, about four miles away, and shortly before his death Henry credited Davies with teaching him what an orator should be. Though Davies was driven by religion, his ministry also had a remarkable political impact: during the Seven Years’ War of 1754-1759 he was known as the best recruiter of volunteer militiamen, his patriotic sermons made him unmatched as a pulpit orator in Virginia or perhaps all the colonies, and this gift earned him the title Apostle of Virginia. Patrick Henry later became the leading Virginia statesman in defending the rights of Colonial America, winning fame as a young lawyer in the Parsons’ Cause in 1763, articulating core revolutionary principles in his 1765 resolutions against the Stamp Act, and delivering “Give me liberty or give me death” at the Second Virginia Convention in 1775 before fellow delegates George Washington and Thomas Jefferson at St. John’s Church. Called the Voice of the Revolution, he served twenty-six years in the Virginia legislature, was the first elected governor of Virginia and later served five terms as governor, helped draft the Virginia Constitution of 1776 and its Declaration of Rights, strongly influenced the creation of the Bill of Rights through his criticism of the U.S. Constitution, and was buried after his death at Red Hill Plantation, now the site of the Patrick Henry National Memorial.

Virginia · United States