Grace’s Outreach to the African-American Population
in the 19th and 20th Centuries
Told through a comparison of Parochial Reports 1837-1970
by Kathie Woods
Each year the Diocese of Virginia publishes a record of the Annual Council that includes reports from each parish in the Diocese. Completeness of these records depends on the individual parishes correctly reporting many categories of possible activity and their financial transactions. It also depends on what questions the Diocese chooses to ask. While the Diocese started having Annual Councils in 1796, I didn’t find any helpful records until 1837. Over the next 100+ years I sampled Annual Council reports at differing intervals to see how patterns changed and whether wars, pandemics or financial collapses might have affected, or been reflected in, the data. In the early years I tracked Walker’s Parish (Grace Church), St. John’s Green Springs (a parish church of Walker’s for decades), Christ Church, Charlottesville (CVL), St. Ann’s (Glendower), the colonial center for the southern half of Albemarle, and Christ Church, Gordonsville (GVL). I was looking for the way they seemed to interact with the “colored community” (the term used in Diocesan records, so I use it here) over decades, and how that compared with what Grace Church was doing. When colored Episcopal churches appeared in our area a little later, I tracked them as well.
While it was technically unlawful to teach slaves to read or write, it’s likely that a few had been educated along with the white children they tended, and others had received at least a rudimentary education in order to do the tasks required of them. When slavery was abolished, education was one of the most important goals of the rest of the newly freed population. Teachers from the New England Freedman’s Aid Society (NEFAS) arrived in Charlottesville in 1865, on the heels of the Union Army, and stayed for the next ten years, teaching thousands of former slaves the basics of reading, writing, arithmetic and geography, and helping them to take their places in the new economy/society. Crucible in the Classroom, a UVA PhD dissertation by Lauranett Lorraine Lee, 2002, tells the story of one such school in Charlottesville – the joy teachers experienced from their teaching and from the students they taught, the hostility they faced from the part of the general population that saw them as a threat, and the practical problems of their students who had to walk several miles each way to school while juggling work and school. It also tells of how those white New England women ultimately raised up the next generation of (colored) teachers and helped birth the Jefferson School.
Churches emerged as another possible source for education as well as religious expression, with the first Episcopal “Sunday School” category reported in 1863 (“white and colored combined”) with a total of 885 students. In 1869, Edward S. Pegram, then the owner of Merrie Mill plantation, was Grace Church’s lay delegate to Annual Council and served on the first Commission on Colored Churches as well as a Trustee of the Diocesan schools. The diocesan Sunday Schools had grown 7-fold and had been divided into “white” (6163 students) and “colored” (309 students) populations. Those categories lasted through the 1930’s, with a combined total reappearing in the mid-1940’s, then disappearing when the Diocese decided in 1949 to do away with racial distinctions in reporting. The post-Civil War question would be whether “colored” congregations could join the Protestant Episcopal Church as equal members when their leaders had yet little or no higher education and their congregants were often barely literate. Would faith and passion overcome institutional bias toward academic credentials (and perhaps latent paternalism and racism)? The debate raged for almost two decades, and in 1886 a separate “Colored Missionary Jurisdiction” was created. It reported to the Diocese and had its own annual convocation. Two members from the Colored Missionary Jurisdiction would have seats and voice at the diocesan Annual Council.
On a more positive note, by 1872 Ebenezer Boyden was in his 33rd year as Grace’s Rector. He had argued strongly against emancipation in his 1860 publication The Epidemic of the Nineteenth Century. Whether he had changed his mind in the interim, or the new situation had changed his perspective, it seems he had begun to allow freed slaves to build homes on his land. Ella Rives (daughter of Judith Page Rives), who never married but spent most of her adult life trying to help the poorer people around her, arranged for a Sunday School building to be constructed about where our Parish House is now situated, and she and Rev. Boyden embarked on a great adventure.
While it may have taken a while to complete and come to full flower, by 1878, with a congregation of 42 white and 1 colored communicants, we find no white Sunday School at Grace, but a “colored” Sunday School with 7 teachers and 80 students. The only other colored Sunday School in Albemarle County at the time was at St. Ann’s, Glendower, at the southern end of Albemarle County, that was started the year before (1877); another dozen colored Sunday Schools were scattered around the state serving a total of less than 1,000 students.
Grace’s “colored Sunday School” continued, except for one year when there was no Rector, under the leadership of Rev. Boyden, then Robb White (who expanded it exponentially), E.L. Goodwin, E. Valentine Jones and F.L. Robinson, at least until 1920, first at Grace Church itself until about the end of the 19th century, then at a “mission church” at Stony Point. The Stony Point Sunday School was run for decades by Miss Selma Nelson, who is buried at Grace, right behind Angie’s office, as is Philip W. Nelson, longtime Grace Senior Warden who may have been her brother. (The All Saints church we now have in Stony Point is not the one in which Selma Nelson ran her Sunday School. Our current All Saints property was given to us only in 1929.) While Grace Church itself seems to have stayed consistently “white” and sponsored white mission churches in the early 1900s, its 42-year outreach to the African-American community through the sponsorship of educational programs seems something quite special.
While most white Virginia Episcopal churches had no interest in establishing colored Sunday Schools, the little area that includes Cismont, Stony Point and Gordonsville held both white and colored Sunday Schools for a large part of the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century.
Christ Episcopal Church, Gordonsville was a post-Civil War phenomenon, a mission church of St. Thomas Church, Orange, that first appeared in 1875 with a white congregation and white Sunday School. In 1880, while there were still 3 white teachers and 20 white Sunday School students, there were also 6 white teachers with 100 colored students. In 1884, there were 151 colored Sunday School students and a parochial (training) school with 2 teachers and 118 students. Substantial numbers of white teachers and students continued to attend Christ Church GVL through the 1890’s, while by 1884 colored communicants began to attend two new mission churches nearer their homes, St. Paul’s and Calvary, whose +/-50 total communicants spawned 5 total Sunday Schools with 150+ students and 2 parochial schools with a total of 140 students. Through 1904, colored communicants, Sunday school and parochial school attendees were being reported through Calvary, St. Paul’s, St. Mary’s (Albano) and Christ Church GVL, or not at all, depending on the year. Total colored attendance at colored Sunday schools exceeded 100 in most of the years reported. Christ Church GVL seems to have had an active white congregation since the late 19th century; St. Margaret’s, St. Mary’s and St. Paul’s had closed by the end of the 1960’s.
This outreach to the colored community, directly by Grace Church, Keswick and Christ Church, Gordonsville or through the new colored churches it nurtured, was unusual to say the least. In the 1880’s these two white churches combined had not much more than 1% of the total diocesan communicants or budget, but they usually had 15%-20% of total colored diocesan Sunday school students, and sometimes an even larger percentage of parochial day schools. In 1894, Grace, St. Paul’s and Calvary had 42% of the colored Sunday School students and 82% of the colored parochial day school students in the diocese. In 1895 the percentages were 29% and 42%; in 1896 they were 29% and 36%; in 1897, 36% and 82%.
With a change of Rectors in 1905, to Rev. F.A. Meade, colored churches and worshipers disappeared from the Christ Church, GVL record, as the white Episcopal church went its own way. The colored churches continued to have Sunday schools much larger than their congregations until 1910, when they suddenly vanished, returning in 1915 with smaller congregations and smaller Sunday schools. St. Paul’s, GVL and St. Mary’s, Somerset continued offering colored Sunday Schools larger than their congregations until 1946. St. Paul’s closed in the 1950s; St. Mary’s in 1967.
By 1920 there were no longer colored Sunday Schools at Grace, and there were only 17 colored Sunday schools in the Diocese of Virginia. One of these was Trinity Mission, a colored Episcopal church founded in Charlottesville September 1919. Trinity Episcopal grew steadily until 1970, the last year of my research. At that time, it had 166 communicants and a Sunday School with 7 teachers and 68 students; its Rector (Henry B. Mitchell) had led them for ten years.
Looking back through a somewhat cloudy lens, we see that Fredericksville Parish (from 1761 headquartered at what would much later become known as Grace Church), whose Vestry had been charged by the British King with the care of widows, orphans, and others unable to care for themselves, was engaged in direct institutional outreach to the community from early colonial times. As a parish of the Protestant Episcopal Church of Virginia, Grace Church seems to have continued that outreach in the form of direct aid to the colored community from at least 1869, when E.S. Pegram worked on the Diocesan Committee on Colored Churches.
Edward S. Pegram was again involved with the African-American community in 1876 when he sold 18.25 acres of Merrie Mill to Abram and Kizeah Robertson (or Robinson, as the Zion Hill records show) for $365.00. In 1883, the Robertsons sold one acre of this land to Henry Mitchell and Thomas Scott, trustees for Zion Hill Baptist Church, for $20.00, the same per acre price they had paid for the original parcel. It’s likely that this parcel became the Zion Hill cemetery. As described, it wasn’t a big enough parcel to have been the church property.
At the same time, colored churches of other denominations were being founded in the post-Civil War period – and Grace has been working closely with at least two of them for almost a century and a half. Zion Hill Baptist Church and St. John Baptist Church, established in the 1870’s or 1880’s, are within a few miles of Grace Church.
In February 1940 when Zion Hill Baptist Church burned down, Grace Church and Rev. Robinson provided half the cost of rebuilding, as is proclaimed on Zion Hill’s website. Zion Hill’s congregation provided the other half, and the church was rebuilt in nine months to everyone’s great joy.
The reduction in the number of educational opportunities for African American students in local Episcopal churches as the 20th century progressed was likely due to several factors: 1) the growth of Baptist and A.M.E. churches with equally compelling messages; 2) the increasing opportunities for rural education in Rosenwald and other public or private (segregated) schools, and 3) the attitudes that made interactions with a substantial percentage of the white population considerably less pleasant. Albemarle’s Black Classrooms, a Lorenzo Dickerson film available on DVD, seems to catch the spirit of the times.
This short synopsis of almost 135 years of Grace Church’s official interaction with the African-American community is, of course, incomplete.
There’s lots missing from this report, and I would love to hear from those of you who have more information on the missing years or can suggest more resources to add to our collection.
Respectfully submitted,
Kathie Woods
[email protected]
While it was technically unlawful to teach slaves to read or write, it’s likely that a few had been educated along with the white children they tended, and others had received at least a rudimentary education in order to do the tasks required of them. When slavery was abolished, education was one of the most important goals of the rest of the newly freed population. Teachers from the New England Freedman’s Aid Society (NEFAS) arrived in Charlottesville in 1865, on the heels of the Union Army, and stayed for the next ten years, teaching thousands of former slaves the basics of reading, writing, arithmetic and geography, and helping them to take their places in the new economy/society. Crucible in the Classroom, a UVA PhD dissertation by Lauranett Lorraine Lee, 2002, tells the story of one such school in Charlottesville – the joy teachers experienced from their teaching and from the students they taught, the hostility they faced from the part of the general population that saw them as a threat, and the practical problems of their students who had to walk several miles each way to school while juggling work and school. It also tells of how those white New England women ultimately raised up the next generation of (colored) teachers and helped birth the Jefferson School.
Churches emerged as another possible source for education as well as religious expression, with the first Episcopal “Sunday School” category reported in 1863 (“white and colored combined”) with a total of 885 students. In 1869, Edward S. Pegram, then the owner of Merrie Mill plantation, was Grace Church’s lay delegate to Annual Council and served on the first Commission on Colored Churches as well as a Trustee of the Diocesan schools. The diocesan Sunday Schools had grown 7-fold and had been divided into “white” (6163 students) and “colored” (309 students) populations. Those categories lasted through the 1930’s, with a combined total reappearing in the mid-1940’s, then disappearing when the Diocese decided in 1949 to do away with racial distinctions in reporting. The post-Civil War question would be whether “colored” congregations could join the Protestant Episcopal Church as equal members when their leaders had yet little or no higher education and their congregants were often barely literate. Would faith and passion overcome institutional bias toward academic credentials (and perhaps latent paternalism and racism)? The debate raged for almost two decades, and in 1886 a separate “Colored Missionary Jurisdiction” was created. It reported to the Diocese and had its own annual convocation. Two members from the Colored Missionary Jurisdiction would have seats and voice at the diocesan Annual Council.
On a more positive note, by 1872 Ebenezer Boyden was in his 33rd year as Grace’s Rector. He had argued strongly against emancipation in his 1860 publication The Epidemic of the Nineteenth Century. Whether he had changed his mind in the interim, or the new situation had changed his perspective, it seems he had begun to allow freed slaves to build homes on his land. Ella Rives (daughter of Judith Page Rives), who never married but spent most of her adult life trying to help the poorer people around her, arranged for a Sunday School building to be constructed about where our Parish House is now situated, and she and Rev. Boyden embarked on a great adventure.
While it may have taken a while to complete and come to full flower, by 1878, with a congregation of 42 white and 1 colored communicants, we find no white Sunday School at Grace, but a “colored” Sunday School with 7 teachers and 80 students. The only other colored Sunday School in Albemarle County at the time was at St. Ann’s, Glendower, at the southern end of Albemarle County, that was started the year before (1877); another dozen colored Sunday Schools were scattered around the state serving a total of less than 1,000 students.
Grace’s “colored Sunday School” continued, except for one year when there was no Rector, under the leadership of Rev. Boyden, then Robb White (who expanded it exponentially), E.L. Goodwin, E. Valentine Jones and F.L. Robinson, at least until 1920, first at Grace Church itself until about the end of the 19th century, then at a “mission church” at Stony Point. The Stony Point Sunday School was run for decades by Miss Selma Nelson, who is buried at Grace, right behind Angie’s office, as is Philip W. Nelson, longtime Grace Senior Warden who may have been her brother. (The All Saints church we now have in Stony Point is not the one in which Selma Nelson ran her Sunday School. Our current All Saints property was given to us only in 1929.) While Grace Church itself seems to have stayed consistently “white” and sponsored white mission churches in the early 1900s, its 42-year outreach to the African-American community through the sponsorship of educational programs seems something quite special.
While most white Virginia Episcopal churches had no interest in establishing colored Sunday Schools, the little area that includes Cismont, Stony Point and Gordonsville held both white and colored Sunday Schools for a large part of the last decades of the 19th century and the first decades of the 20th century.
Christ Episcopal Church, Gordonsville was a post-Civil War phenomenon, a mission church of St. Thomas Church, Orange, that first appeared in 1875 with a white congregation and white Sunday School. In 1880, while there were still 3 white teachers and 20 white Sunday School students, there were also 6 white teachers with 100 colored students. In 1884, there were 151 colored Sunday School students and a parochial (training) school with 2 teachers and 118 students. Substantial numbers of white teachers and students continued to attend Christ Church GVL through the 1890’s, while by 1884 colored communicants began to attend two new mission churches nearer their homes, St. Paul’s and Calvary, whose +/-50 total communicants spawned 5 total Sunday Schools with 150+ students and 2 parochial schools with a total of 140 students. Through 1904, colored communicants, Sunday school and parochial school attendees were being reported through Calvary, St. Paul’s, St. Mary’s (Albano) and Christ Church GVL, or not at all, depending on the year. Total colored attendance at colored Sunday schools exceeded 100 in most of the years reported. Christ Church GVL seems to have had an active white congregation since the late 19th century; St. Margaret’s, St. Mary’s and St. Paul’s had closed by the end of the 1960’s.
This outreach to the colored community, directly by Grace Church, Keswick and Christ Church, Gordonsville or through the new colored churches it nurtured, was unusual to say the least. In the 1880’s these two white churches combined had not much more than 1% of the total diocesan communicants or budget, but they usually had 15%-20% of total colored diocesan Sunday school students, and sometimes an even larger percentage of parochial day schools. In 1894, Grace, St. Paul’s and Calvary had 42% of the colored Sunday School students and 82% of the colored parochial day school students in the diocese. In 1895 the percentages were 29% and 42%; in 1896 they were 29% and 36%; in 1897, 36% and 82%.
With a change of Rectors in 1905, to Rev. F.A. Meade, colored churches and worshipers disappeared from the Christ Church, GVL record, as the white Episcopal church went its own way. The colored churches continued to have Sunday schools much larger than their congregations until 1910, when they suddenly vanished, returning in 1915 with smaller congregations and smaller Sunday schools. St. Paul’s, GVL and St. Mary’s, Somerset continued offering colored Sunday Schools larger than their congregations until 1946. St. Paul’s closed in the 1950s; St. Mary’s in 1967.
By 1920 there were no longer colored Sunday Schools at Grace, and there were only 17 colored Sunday schools in the Diocese of Virginia. One of these was Trinity Mission, a colored Episcopal church founded in Charlottesville September 1919. Trinity Episcopal grew steadily until 1970, the last year of my research. At that time, it had 166 communicants and a Sunday School with 7 teachers and 68 students; its Rector (Henry B. Mitchell) had led them for ten years.
Looking back through a somewhat cloudy lens, we see that Fredericksville Parish (from 1761 headquartered at what would much later become known as Grace Church), whose Vestry had been charged by the British King with the care of widows, orphans, and others unable to care for themselves, was engaged in direct institutional outreach to the community from early colonial times. As a parish of the Protestant Episcopal Church of Virginia, Grace Church seems to have continued that outreach in the form of direct aid to the colored community from at least 1869, when E.S. Pegram worked on the Diocesan Committee on Colored Churches.
Edward S. Pegram was again involved with the African-American community in 1876 when he sold 18.25 acres of Merrie Mill to Abram and Kizeah Robertson (or Robinson, as the Zion Hill records show) for $365.00. In 1883, the Robertsons sold one acre of this land to Henry Mitchell and Thomas Scott, trustees for Zion Hill Baptist Church, for $20.00, the same per acre price they had paid for the original parcel. It’s likely that this parcel became the Zion Hill cemetery. As described, it wasn’t a big enough parcel to have been the church property.
At the same time, colored churches of other denominations were being founded in the post-Civil War period – and Grace has been working closely with at least two of them for almost a century and a half. Zion Hill Baptist Church and St. John Baptist Church, established in the 1870’s or 1880’s, are within a few miles of Grace Church.
In February 1940 when Zion Hill Baptist Church burned down, Grace Church and Rev. Robinson provided half the cost of rebuilding, as is proclaimed on Zion Hill’s website. Zion Hill’s congregation provided the other half, and the church was rebuilt in nine months to everyone’s great joy.
The reduction in the number of educational opportunities for African American students in local Episcopal churches as the 20th century progressed was likely due to several factors: 1) the growth of Baptist and A.M.E. churches with equally compelling messages; 2) the increasing opportunities for rural education in Rosenwald and other public or private (segregated) schools, and 3) the attitudes that made interactions with a substantial percentage of the white population considerably less pleasant. Albemarle’s Black Classrooms, a Lorenzo Dickerson film available on DVD, seems to catch the spirit of the times.
This short synopsis of almost 135 years of Grace Church’s official interaction with the African-American community is, of course, incomplete.
There’s lots missing from this report, and I would love to hear from those of you who have more information on the missing years or can suggest more resources to add to our collection.
Respectfully submitted,
Kathie Woods
[email protected]
