Jamestown’s Churches

At Jamestown, the first church services were held outdoors under an awning made from an old sail fastened to trees, after which colonists built a first church inside James Fort that Captain John Smith described as a homely structure like a barn set on cratchetts and covered with rafts, sedge, and earth. This church burned in January 1608 and was replaced by a similar second church. In 1617-1619, Governor Samuel Argall had the inhabitants of Jamestown build a new wooden church 50 foot long and twenty foot broad atop a cobblestone foundation capped by a one-brick-thick wall, and the first assembly met in this third church. In January 1639, Governor John Harvey reported that he, the Council, the ablest planters, and some sea captains had contributed to the building of a brick church at Jamestown; built around the third church, this fourth church remained incomplete until sometime after November 1647. The fourth church burned on September 19, 1676, during Bacon’s Rebellion, and by 1686 a fifth church had been built using the walls and foundations of the older charred church. Its tower, the only 17th-century structure still standing at Jamestown, survived after the church was abandoned in the 1750s and fell into ruin by the 1790s, when bricks from other parts were reused to build the present graveyard wall. During the 19th century, the tower became a silent symbol to many Americans of their early heritage, and in the 1890s the APVA Preservation Virginia acquired, strengthened, and preserved the tower and the foundations of the earlier churches on the site.

Virginia · United States