Yeocomico Church

About this property

Yeocomico Church is a colonial-era Episcopal church near Kinsale in Westmoreland County in the U.S. state of Virginia. The church building dates as far back as 1706. It is now the main church of Cople Parish, which also includes Nomini Church near Mount Holly. Yeocomico Church, the fourth oldest in the state, was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1970. The cemetery includes the graves of several bishops and author John Dos Passos. In 1653, the western boundary of Northumberland County was set at Nomini Creek, and shortly thereafter a parish was ordered on the western end, perhaps briefly named Westbury. (This part of the county, west of Hampton Hall Creek, would be transferred to Westmoreland County in the 1664 reorganization. In that reorganization the eastern part of the reboundaried Westmoreland County, including the former Westbury parish, was organized as Cople Parish.) With the appointment of the first vestry in 1655, Yeocomico's original wooden structure was built that year, parts of which were incorporated into the successor church. That first building was replaced in 1706 by a structure built of locally fired bricks. According to local tradition, the church became barracks during the American Revolution. A special tax assessment was made for repairs to the church in 1788, a period where the Episcopal Church was still government-supported in Virginia. The church was, like most other Anglican churches in Virginia, abandoned after either the Revolution or the Episcopal Church's disestablishment (in Virginia) circa 1794. Its last 18th century rector was present in 1799 but thereafter disappears from the record. Afterwards, as the building fell into disrepair, sheep were reportedly stabled there overnight from time to time. During the War of 1812, part of the U.S. 36th Regiment camped in the courtyard. Among the soldiers of the 36th was William L. Rogers from Princeton, New Jersey, who after the war would return and marry Ann Ballantine Murphy, daughter of the owners of Ayrfield, the property adjacent to the church. Rogers wrote a letter to Bishop William Meade forty years later in which he described the condition of the church in 1814: "Its doors were open, its windows broken, the roof partly decayed and fallen in, and, to complete its apparent hopeless fate, a pine-tree thirty or forty feet nigh was blown up by the roots and lay across the main structure." The soldiers undertook to remove the tree, and to "cleanse the church and repair it as far as practicable, to make it a safe depository for our stores and camp-equipage." Rogers relates that, after they had been ordered to the defense of Fort McHenry, a "company of militia from the upper country" had set up camp there, and caused considerable damage to the church as well as the surrounding countryside. They used the communion table as a chopping block, although its surface was later restored. Some "American patrol" (likely part of this latter group) took away the baptismal font to use as a drinking bowl. The baptismal font was regained and taken to Ayrfield where Mr. Murphy restored it. On a later visit in 1820, Rogers was so disturbed at the church's condition that he persuaded his father-in-law to enlist the aid of other neighbors to do what repairs and restoration they could.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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