News

Unearthing the Faithful Foundations of a Historic Black Church

In Colonial Williamsburg, a neglected Christian past is being restored.

Illustration by Laura Freeman

They dug up broken bits of lamp, the foot of a porcelain doll, a piece of what was once a bowl, and brick fragments from the Baptist church where African Americans worshiped while they were still enslaved. They excavated down to the foundation. Carefully clearing away the earth, they exposed the cross-stacked bricks at the base, dusted them off, and called Connie Matthews Harshaw.

Harshaw stood at the edge of the dig. A member of the historic black First Baptist Church in Williamsburg, Virginia, she had pushed for this project before anyone knew if they would find anything worthwhile. She had come a long way by faith. Now the archaeologists had something to show her.

“I see it,” she said. “We were here and we were strong. Through it all, we kept the faith, and we were hopeful. That’s a story to tell.”

Colonial Williamsburg, the living history museum that recreates the life of the 18th-century town that was then the capital of the colony of Virginia, is excavating a black Baptist church. The first phase was finished in November, and the second started this January, with the ultimate aim of reconstructing the building and recovering its history.

First Baptist was founded by free and enslaved African Americans in 1776, not long after the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It was illegal for black people to congregate and worship then, but they did anyway. At first they met secretly in a hidden brush structure. Then a Virginia woman decided to let the man she owned become a Baptist minister, and Gowan Pamphlet became the first ordained black man in America in 1772, a dozen years before the better-known Lemuel Haynes. Inspired by the Great Awakening, Pamphlet preached sin, salvation, and the equality of all before God.

A white family dedicated land to the worshipers, and First Baptist built a church. They prayed, heard the Word, and kept the faith through the Civil War, the failure of Reconstruction, the rise of “black codes” and Jim Crow, the Great Depression, and World War II.

Then the church was torn down in the 1950s to make way for the Colonial Williamsburg museum. The site was paved over for a parking lot. No one in charge thought the simple black church was worth preserving until more than a half century later, when Harshaw, representing the congregation that continues worshiping about a mile away, asked why not.

“There’s this placard about this church that was organized in 1776, but where’s the rest of the story?” Harshaw asked Cliff Fleet, the new president of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation. He asked her what she would like to have happen.

“Uncover—literally uncover—the history of this church,” she said.

A lot of black Christian history has been buried in America, according to historian Paul Harvey, author of Christianity and Race in the American South and more than a half dozen other titles on African American Christianity.

Black institutions often haven’t had the resources to preserve their history. And white institutions “just didn’t care enough” in most cases, Harvey said.

As many historians have pointed out, the documentary record is often a reflection of who had power at a given time, not the product of a careful evaluation of what will be important. Starting in the 1970s, historians inspired by the civil rights movement started arguing that black history, and especially black religious history, was essential to understanding America.

“The neglect of black history…distorted both white and black American perception of who they were,” said historian Albert J. Raboteau, who wrote Slave Religion: The “Invisible Institution” in the Antebellum South about 20 years after the First Baptist Church at Colonial Williamsburg was torn down. “For a people to ‘lose’ their history, to have their story denigrated as insignificant, is a devastating blow, an exclusion that in effect denies their full humanity. Conversely, to ignore the history of another people whose fate has been intimately bound up with your own is to forgo self-understanding.”

In the years since, historians have gone to great lengths to recover what was lost. Raboteau combed through slave narratives, looking for every reference to faith. Harvey searched through travel narratives and white church records, looking for commentary on black Christians. Much of what he found was explicitly racist and dismissed African American faith as ignorant, but nonetheless it offered him glimpses of the forgotten Christians’ faith and practice.

Other recovery efforts are even more creative. At Colonial Williamsburg, for example, several African American men have been performing Gowan Pamphlet for visitors to the living history museum. James Ingram, one of the reenactors, started in 1998 with a two-paragraph description of everything that was then known about the black Baptist minister.

“What really stuck out to me was that those couple of paragraphs were kind of conjecture,” Ingram said.

For the past 22 years, Ingram has learned everything he could about the world Pamphlet lived in. And he has tried to imaginatively access Pamphlet’s history by using their shared experiences.

Ingram is also Baptist, also ordained, and also a black man who grew up in Virginia. He writes sermons as Pamphlet and thinks about what he would have preached in the years after the Declaration of Independance.

He’s hoping the excavation of the church will give him more information.

Jack Gary, the director of archaeology at Colonial Williamsburg, hopes so too. But it’s slow work. Six professional archaeologists and several graduate students pull back the soil by hand, running it through a screen and collecting and documenting everything they find. They take pictures and draw maps, noting even the stains in the dirt, which might tell them something. They record bits of glass, distinguishing which come from windows and which from wine bottles.

Later, they will wash it all, curate it, and work together to interpret the whole assemblage of things left behind and buried at the First Baptist Church.

They dig up an ink bottle, which means someone at this church could write. A vanilla extract bottle, which means someone was cooking. Animal bones, which might mean there was a barbecue. And they slowly uncover the foundation of the old church.

“The building itself is probably not going to be an architectural wonder,” Gary said. “But our study of it provides the place where we can have these conversations about the early African American Baptists and what they went through. You can stand on that spot and it’s powerful.”

Connie Matthews Harshaw felt that right away.

“It is nobody but God,” she said. “He is all up in the mix.”

Daniel Silliman is news editor for Christianity Today.

Also in this issue

Bible translation is fraught with challenges, especially when beloved passages are at stake. Producing Bibles gets even more challenging as publishers wade into the unavoidably subjective realm of study notes and margin commentaries. Yet through it all—and through storm and worldwide sickness—the Word of the Lord endures. Our issue this month pays homage to the timeless truth of Scripture, as well as to a few other books our team of judges loved this year.

Cover Story

COVID-19 Hurts. But the Bible Brings Hope.

Cover Story

Why There Are So Many ‘Miraculous’ Stories of Bibles Surviving Disaster

Cover Story

When A Word Is Worth A Thousand Complaints (and When It Isn’t)

New & Noteworthy Fiction

Our Attraction to Idols Remains the Same, Even When the Names Change

Review

A Christian Approach to Social Justice Is Slow, Careful, and Self-Reflective

Where Is the Gospel in God’s Judgments on the Nations?

Review

After Binging on the Internet in 2020, We Need a Major Knowledge-Diet Overhaul

Testimony

I Was Filming a Dangerous Action Scene When I Gave My Life to Christ

Reply All

News

The Majority of American Megachurches Are Now Multiracial

News

Gambia’s Christians Take a Stand in the Public Square

News

Questions Continue for Women in Complementarian Churches

News

Gleanings: January 2021

Don’t Pack Away the Dinnerware During COVID-19

Our Jan/Feb Issue: Tomato, Tomahto, and the Bible

Timely and Eternal

Are the 81 Percent Evangelicals?

Can We Do Better than the Enneagram?

The Pro-Life Project Has a Playbook: Racial Justice History

5 Books on the Nature of Human Emotions

Excerpt

The Cross Is God’s Answer to Black Rage

Christianity Today’s 2021 Book Awards

View issue

Our Latest

Why Armenian Christians Recall Noah’s Ark in December

The biblical account of the Flood resonates with a persecuted church born near Mount Ararat.

Review

The Virgin Birth Is More Than an Incredible Occurrence

We’re eager to ask whether it could have happened. We shouldn’t forget to ask what it means.

The Nine Days of Filipino Christmas

Some Protestants observe the Catholic tradition of Simbang Gabi, predawn services in the days leading up to Christmas.

The Bulletin

Neighborhood Threat

The Bulletin talks about Christians in Syria, Bible education, and the “bad guys” of NYC.

Join CT for a Live Book Awards Event

A conversation with Russell Moore, Book of the Year winner Gavin Ortlund, and Award of Merit winner Brad East.

Excerpt

There’s No Such Thing as a ‘Proper’ Christmas Carol

As we learn from the surprising journeys of several holiday classics, the term defies easy definition.

Advent Calls Us Out of Our Despair

Sitting in the dark helps us truly appreciate the light.

Advent Doesn’t Have to Make Sense

As a curator, I love how contemporary art makes the world feel strange. So does the story of Jesus’ birth.

Apple PodcastsDown ArrowDown ArrowDown Arrowarrow_left_altLeft ArrowLeft ArrowRight ArrowRight ArrowRight Arrowarrow_up_altUp ArrowUp ArrowAvailable at Amazoncaret-downCloseCloseEmailEmailExpandExpandExternalExternalFacebookfacebook-squareGiftGiftGooglegoogleGoogle KeephamburgerInstagraminstagram-squareLinkLinklinkedin-squareListenListenListenChristianity TodayCT Creative Studio Logologo_orgMegaphoneMenuMenupausePinterestPlayPlayPocketPodcastRSSRSSSaveSaveSaveSearchSearchsearchSpotifyStitcherTelegramTable of ContentsTable of Contentstwitter-squareWhatsAppXYouTubeYouTube