Virginia History (1584) from The Original 13-A Documentary History of Religion in America's First Thirteen States (Amerisearch, 2009):
<Sir Walter Raleigh named Virginia after Virgin Queen Elizabeth. In 1584, he attempted to found the Roanoke Colony, located in present day North Carolina, but it failed. Jamestown was founded by members of the Church of England, which was the established denomination from 1606 until 1786.
Catholics were prohibited, with even Lord Baltimore, a friend of Charles I, being prohibited from stopping in Virginia in 1628 on his way to found the Colony of Maryland as a refuge for persecuted Catholics. The first Catholic Church in Virginia, St. Mary Church, was not erected until 1795 in Alexandria.
The Civil War in England between Charles I and the Puritans, had repercussions in America. Beginning in 1639, "to tolerate Puritanism was to resist the king," therefore laws were passed requiring the "governor and council to take care that all non-conformists be compelled to depart the colony."
Quakers began arriving in 1655, and the first known Quaker missionary, William Robinson, was hung in 1659 in Boston "accused of heresy and of being a seducer of the people to faction and committing in open court the felony of denying the humanity of Christ."
Quaker marriages were not recognized. France's St. Bartholomew's Day massacre and the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes led French Protestant Huguenots to immigrate to Virginia. In 1699, the Virginia Assembly adopted William and Mary's first statute for allowing some toleration of Protestant dissenters. In 1702, there were reported 49 Anglican parishes with 34 ministers, 3 Quaker Meetings, and 3 Presbyterian congregations.
In 1729, the Shenandoah Valley, an outlying buffer area from the Indians, was settled by Scotch-Irish Presbyterians, German Lutherans, Mennonites, and Moravians-Church of the Brethren. Their decision to settle on the frontier spared them much persecution. In 1714, a small number of English Baptists settled in southeast Virginia and 30 years later a larger number settled in northwest Virginia and in the Blue Ridge region.
As their numbers grew rapidly, they were greatly persecuted in the 1760-1770 period preceding the Revolutionary War. Francis L. Hawks, in his Ecclesiastical History, 1836, wrote:
"There was a bitterness in the hatred of this denomination towards the established Church, which surpassed that of all others...No dissenters in Virginia experienced for a time harsher treatment than the Baptists. They were beaten and imprisoned, and cruelty taxed ingenuity to devise new modes of punishment and annoyance."
Anglican Methodists grew to large numbers beginning in the 1730's due to George Whitefield's Great Awakening Revival. When Anglican Methodist Bishop Francis Asbury chose to separate the Methodist Church from the Anglican Church, the Anglicans lost their majority, resulting in the Anglican Church being disestablished in 1786.
Small numbers of Sephardic Jews came to Virginia in the late 1650's and a larger number of Ashkenazic Jews arrived in the 1830's, fleeing persecution in Germany and Eastern Europe. The first permanent synagogue community, Kehilah ha Kadosh Beth Shalome, was founded in 1789 in Richmond, Virginia, with its first permanent building built in 1820.> 1584VH001
--
American Quotations by William J. Federer, 2024, All Rights Reserved, Permission granted to use with acknowledgement.
Endnotes:.
1584VH001. William J. Federer, American Quotations (2014). Virginia History, beginning 1584. William J. Federer, The Original 13-A Documentary History of Religion in America's First Thirteen States (St. Louis, MO: Amerisearch, Inc.).