History of Saint James': Warrenton's First Churches

Journalist M. Louise Evans and Warrenton’s First Churches (II)

In an earlier church bulletin (Sunday, March 8, 2015) excerpts from an article by long-time parishioner and journalist Louise Evans appeared.  The article, originally published in The Fauquier Democrat in 1950, dwelt on her close attachment to Saint James’ Church.  The following year, on June 21, 1951, she wrote an informative piece on Warrenton’s first churches, excerpted below:

…the first church edifices in Warrenton were exceedingly primitive and not one of them is now standing,  The old Methodist Church stood northwest of Ullman’s (department store), on the corner of Lee and Fourth Streets, and it was built of wood, unplastered and whitewashed, within and without.

The oldest Episcopal Church in this community was called the Turkey Run Church (built in 1755 about a mile south of Warrenton.  The early settlers were moving farther into the interior; the church was a large frame building erected to serve the growing crossroads settlement, soon to be known as Fauquier Court House, then Warrenton).  There is nothing there to mark the site…with the exception of a few old graves.  They say in 1814 Bishop Moore confirmed a class of over fifty candidates there.   The next Episcopal Church stood upon the site occupied (today by the First Baptist Church just below the court house)….  In those days the pastor, Mr. Lemmon, walked from the rectory to the church in his robes, according to a good old custom.

The original Presbyterian Church stood at the end of Main Street… and this structure was small and probably rather unsubstantial as it was carried away by a cyclone which swept that part of Warrenton in 1855.

…the Catholic Church was built in 1859 (still standing on Lee Street and now converted for commercial use) but was not entirely completed until after the Civil War.

The Baptists were the last to build and their first brick church stood on the site of the present large edifice.  During the Civil War all the churches, the Episcopal excepted  (by then on Culpeper Street), were used by the Union army for hospitals.  The Episcopal Church was left unharmed because of its Gothic architecture which made it unsuitable for a hospital, and it was used as a place of public worship by all denominations.  The Presbyterian Church was even used as a stable, the horses being kept in the basement and the hay thrown down through holes in the floor of the auditorium.  In 1908 the U.S. Court of Claims awarded these churches damages to the amount of about half the loss sustained.

African-American churches were established after the Civil War.  The First Baptist Church was the first in Warrenton.