St. George’s History Committee (Cindy Helton, Malanna Henderson, Steward Henderson, Craig Rains, Trip Wiggins, and the late Barbara Willis, as well as new members Peggy Verdine and Shannon Lee) has diligently written a new publication about St. George’s History. This booklet is not exhaustive, but serves as a succinct introduction to our parish’s history. You can download a copy of it here. Hard copies are available in the church office and the narthex.
Thank you to our History Committee for their commitment to sharing our story.
Stained Glass Windows | Church Bell | Graveyard | Church Organ | Pews |
Chronology Highlights of St. George’s History
18 November 1720: St. George’s Parish is established by the House of Burgesses of Colonial Virginia on ancestral lands of the region’s Native peoples at the same time that Spotsylvania County is established. Churches are built in the parish, likely through the labor of indentured and enslaved persons.
1728: City of Fredericksburg is founded by an act of the General Assembly; two lots are set aside for the church and graveyard.
13 March 1732 and 10 April 1732: Plans are made and recorded in the Vestry Book to begin work on the Rappahannock Church to serve the residents of the frontier port city.
October 1735: The Rev. James Marye is appointed rector and is the first minister to occupy the Fredericksburg Church. He and his family occupy the parish glebe house for only a few years, though he serves as rector until 1767. When he dies in 1768, he awards 29 enslaved persons to his four children.
1753: Fielding Lewis, George Washington’s brother-in-law, serves on the vestry.
1765-1770: The Bray School for enslaved children is established and conducted by the Reverend James Marye and Fielding Lewis. The Rev. James Marye, Jr. assists after the death of his father.
1766: Charles Washington, brother of George Washington, serves on the vestry.
1770: George Washington attends St. George’s.
1771: George Washington moves his mother, Mary Ball Washington, to Fredericksburg, and she attends St. George’s Church.
1774: William Paul, brother of John Paul Jones, is buried in St. George’s graveyard.
1776: With American independence, the church-state ties are dissolved; the General Assembly orders the church to continue to provide welfare for the poor.
1785: With the disestablishment of the Church of England, the first Convention of the Virginia Episcopal Church is held. Vestries elect new members and select delegates for the General Convention.
16 January 1786: The General Assembly passed Thomas Jefferson’s Act to Establish Religious Freedom. By 1789, St. George’s joins the new Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States.
1788: George Washington’s attendance at St. George’s creates a panic in the church because of the large crowd and the fear that the balcony would collapse.
25 August 1789: Mary Ball Washington dies. Her funeral is held at St. George’s, the Rev. Thomas Thornton officiating.
25 January 1795: The Male Charity School is organized by several St. George’s vestrymen and Benjamin Day serves as the first president.
1796: Dr. Charles Mortimer presents the St. George’s congregation with its first organ.
1802: St. George’s organizes the Female Charity School.
23 October 1813: The vestry votes to call Edward C. McGuire as minister of St. George’s. He is 20 years old and too young to be ordained until 1814.
16 October 1815: A new brick building replacing the old wood structure, the second St. George’s Church to stand on the site, is consecrated by Bishop Richard Channing Moore. The cost of the building is $11,000.
1823: The Parish Hall (Faulkner Hall) is built
and used as a Sunday school.
22 April 1849: The present St. George’s building is consecrated. The cost of the building is $19,000, and the sale of pews to parishioners the next day raises $24,000.
May 1851: The City of Fredericksburg installs a clock in the St. George’s steeple. Replaced in 1996, the clock’s operation and maintenance remain the responsibility of the City of Fredericksburg.
1858: The current bell, made by McNeely’s Company in West Troy, New York, is installed in the church steeple. This is the third bell to be installed at St. George’s.
8 October 1858: The Rev. Dr. Edward C. McGuire dies after 45 years as rector. The 1830 Census records that he owned five enslaved persons, and one remained at the time of his death.
November 1862: The Rev. Alfred Randolph, his wife, and day-old child are evacuated from Fredericksburg in advance of the Civil War Battle of Fredericksburg. Regular church services are suspended.
11-15 December 1862: The church is hit by shell fire at least 25 times during the Battle of Fredericksburg. The communion silver is stolen by Union soldiers. By 1931, all four pieces are recovered and returned to the church.
1863: Religious revival meetings are held at St. George’s by General Lee’s troops.
1864: The church building is used by Union forces as a hospital for some of the 60,000 Union and Confederate soldiers wounded in the Battle of the Wilderness and Spotsylvania.
2 December 1864: Services resume at St. George’s Church, with the Rev. Magruder Maury as rector.
April 1874: St. George’s Benevolent Society is incorporated to benefit the poor and to assist widows and orphans.
April 1877: The Rev. Edward C. Murdaugh resigns as rector, which results in 112 communicants of St. George’s organizing Trinity Episcopal Church and calling Murdaugh as rector.
4 March 1878: The vestry approves setting aside an entire block of seats in the gallery for “the colored people.” In 1879 the vestry adopts a resolution to “cordially invite all classes and colors of our citizens to join with us in public worship.”
1885: The “Ascension of Christ” windows above the altar on the east wall are installed in honor of the Reverend McGuire. These are the first of the stained-glass windows to be placed in the church.
11 October 1886: Joseph Walker is hired as sexton of St. George’s. He serves 53 years. Born a slave, he becomes a founder of Walker-Grant High School, the first publicly supported high school for black students in Fredericksburg.
1955: Church services were desegregated under the leadership of the Rev. Thomas Faulkner.
June 1955: Under the leadership of Mary Faulkner, the church fellowship hall opens to young people of the community for Dragnet Dances as a social outlet.
1959: Two-story McGuire Hall connecting Faulkner Hall and the church is built to house the Sunday School.
January 1968: Mrs. Avis Harris is the first woman elected to the vestry.
April 1968: St. George’s hosts a community service in mourning following the assassination of the Rev. Dr.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
1974: S O’Brien Payne is the first African American elected to serve on St. George’s vestry.
1985-2020: St. George’s is actively involved in the formation of organizations serving local homeless persons, including Loisann’s Hope House (1985), Thurman Brisben Shelter (1988), and Micah Ministries (2005).
1986-2020: St. George’s continues its domestic and foreign missionary role including current support for Honduras, Haiti, and Appalachia, and earlier trips to New York Soup Kitchen, Democratic Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, Rose Bud and Red Shirt Village, SD, and Glory Ridge, NC.
2005-2008: Additional Sunday services are added: the 9:00, Rite III Service (11 September 2005), and the 5:30 p.m. Celtic Service (10 Feb. 2008).
26 April 2009: Bishop Peter James Lee presides at the Re-dedication Service after renovations in the church.
2010-2013: The new 2700 -pipe Parsons Organ is installed in the gallery (2010); the music program expands, under the leadership of John Vreeland, to include three adult choirs, two children’s choirs, a bell choir, a Jazz Ensemble, a Chamber Ensemble and Chamber Orchestra, a sung Compline Service, and a Concert Series open to the community.
September 2011: The Montessori based pre-school opens.
15 December 2011: The vestry establishes The Table, an open-market food distribution for those in need.
16 February 2013: From Repentance to Hope: A Service of Remembrance, Celebration and Witness in Commemoration of the 150th Anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation” is held at St. George’s, led by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori.
23 March 2019: St. George’s is listed in the Virginia Landmarks and the National Register of Historic Places.
The Windows
Toward the end of the 19th Century, stained glass windows became popular facets of church decoration all over the country. The three altar windows on the east wall were the first stained glass additions installed at St. George’s. Made in Heidelberg, Germany, they were presented in 1885 in memory of the Reverend Mr. McGuire. The center window, depicting the Ascension of Christ, is flanked on the left by the Apostle Peter and on the right by the Apostle John.
For easy identification, the windows at St. George’s are numbered clockwise from the chancel end on the gospel (right) side of the church.
Window #1 – On the right aisle, the “Mary Ball Washington” window was installed in 1907. A gift of the local chapter of the Daughters of the American Revolution, it was made by the Colgate Glass Company of New York for $1,000.
Window #2 – An “Angel Standing in a Field of Lilies,” was created by the Tiffany Studios and installed in 1914. It is St. George’s second Tiffany window.
Window #3 – The “Resurrection Angel at the Empty Tomb” depicts the Easter morning revelation of the three women coming to discover that Jesus had risen from the dead.
Window #4 – The “Angel of Victory” or “Guardian Angel of Medical Science” is the third Tiffany window. Dated in 1917, it was presented in honor of a local doctor.
Window #5 – The “Nativity” by Wilbur Burnham, dated 1943, is the most recent stained glass window given to the church. It is designed in a 12th-13th Century style, using very small pieces of glass. At the gallery level, it depicts the “Majesty of Christ.”
Windows #6 and #7 – On the left aisle, the “Wafer” and the “Incense,” installed in 1908- 1909, are similar to the ones in the narthex of the same dates.
Window #8 – “Christ on the Road to Emmaus” was the first Tiffany window set in the church, presented in 1912. This window is the one which appears as a single unit from the main floor to the top of the gallery.
Window #9 – “Christ with the Little Children,” made in 1907 by Colgate Glass at a cost of $400-$500, is a memorial to the late Marshall C. Hall, a long-time Sunday School superintendent at St. George’s.
Window #10 – The “Trial of Paul before Agrippa,” was the first window to be installed in the nave, circa 1903. It depicts the trial of Paul before Agrippa, as related in the Book of Acts, Chapter 26.
The Bell
The present bell is the third in the church’s history. The original bell, given by Alexander Spotswood, Jr., was replaced in 1788. The second bell had to be replaced after a wind storm in 1856. The present bell was made in West Troy, New York, in 1858, by the Meneely’s Company.
The Graveyard
Download our graveyard brochure here.
When the City of Fredericksburg was established in 1728, two lots were set aside for the church and graveyard. The present church and graveyard occupy one of the original lots.
Although some graves were removed to make room for the present church building in 1849, others were not disturbed. There is an old tradition that says Colonel Fielding Lewis of Kenmore, Revolutionary War patriot and brother-in-law of George Washington, and his son are buried beneath the front steps of the church. The son, perhaps, resides in the cemetery but Fielding Lewis more likely lies at his son’s plantation in Clarke County.
In 1892, the Ladies’ Cemetery Guild of St. George’s Church undertook to document the history of the cemetery. The earliest legible date to which they could attest without question was 1752, on the grave of an otherwise unknown John Jones. Two years later, there was an Archibald MacPherson, aged 49; and two years after that, Colonel John Dandridge, father of Martha Washington. William Paul, brother of John Paul Jones, was buried there in 1774. The latest ascertainable date is 1924, on the grave of Virginia B. Patton.
At the time of the ladies’ survey, 164 tombstones could be identified; some had no dates, others, no ages. There are 35 known burials without stones.
As part of their project, the ladies spent $150 of the funds raised for cleaning, landscaping, planting, and sowing the cemetery grounds. At the time of their report, they were planning to use the remainder of the money to “enclose the front of the cemetery with a handsome iron fence,” which is still in service today.
More recently on All Saint’s Day 2002, St. Georgians re-interred the remains of six 18th Century Fredericksburg citizens dug up during the renovation of Market Square, using the “Office for Burial of the Dead” from the 1690 Anglican Prayer Book.
The Organ
The first record of an organ in the church is the one given by Dr. Charles Mortimer in 1796. In 1875, $3,000.00 was raised by the women of the church to help purchase a new organ, to be placed in the rear gallery. That organ was enlarged and added onto several times.
In 1983, four pipe organs were purchased from Mary Washington College and the organs were all combined.
In 2007, with the renovation of the Nave, a new pipe organ was commissioned from Parsons Pipe Organ Builders of Canandaigua, NY. This current organ was installed in the fall of 2010.
The Pews
When the church was built, the box pews were “sold” to families, and the money subscribed, together with the annual “pew rents,” went to pay for the building and church operations. Some of the names of early pew holders may still be seen engraved on the silver plates on the pew doors.