Welcome to Historic Polegreen Church

Between 1747 and 1759 at Polegreen, the Reverend Samuel Davies inspired a small rural community, free and slave, to pursue freedom from a controlling government and the established state church. Polegreen became a center of the struggle for civil and religious liberty in Colonial Virginia as the Hanover Dissenters, under Davies's leadership, challenged the established Anglican Church sponsored by the colonial government. Davies was licensed to preach by Governor Gooch in 1747, ministered here and at six other meetinghouses in Central Virginia from 1748 to 1759, and in 1755 the Hanover Presbytery was founded at Polegreen. Young Patrick Henry attended church here with his dissenter mother in the mid-eighteenth century and later said that Davies taught him what an orator should be. In 1759 Davies left Polegreen to become President of the College of New Jersey, and the church was destroyed by artillery fire in 1864 and never rebuilt.

Virginia · United States