“This was the church I went to when I was a child. I remember going to church in the summer and it would be hot so they would open the windows to try to stir up a little breeze throughout the church. The church sat beside a pasture where cows grazed. When the congregation would start singing, the cows in the pasture would lope on over to the wooden fence and lean their heads over the fence and start to moo … singing right along with the people in church. I recall that they did not muuurrrr too much during the sermon but they certainly did seem to enjoy the hymns.” (Jerry Hanline)
Stone’s Chapel is still there on Crum’s Church Road in Clarke County near Berryville, Virginia. So is the pasture with its sturdy wood and wire fence. And there are still cows grazing in the field munching on clover and Queen Anne’s Lace and the native grasses that grow there. But the congregation is no longer there…..no longer gathering on Sunday morning for the worship service….no longer opening the windows to catch the breeze or to sing the old hymns from the old blue-backed Presbyterian hymnal. After more than two hundred years, the chapel is now as still and quiet as the graves in the cemetery outside.
There has been a church at this site since 1740. Historical records note that there was a log building on the site as early as 1785. The first meetings were held in an old barn owned by Jacob Mauser. The earliest settlers in the area were mostly German and Scotch-Irish who were members of the Reform Church of Europe who worshiped God under the teachings of Martin Luther and John Calvin. In the new world, here in Berryville, the church building was used by both the Lutherans and the Calvinists for the first twenty-five years (25) of its existence.
The first Lutheran minister of record was the Reverend Christian Streit, a Lutheran Revolutionary War chaplain, who served his congregation from 1785 to 1812. Pastor Streit held the first communion at the church on October 30, 1785. How wonderful to consider these early American Christians gathering in a barn….no more than a stable really….to worship and take communion.
The Lutheran congregation knew their church as the Stenkirche Lutheran Church. In 1810, the Lutheran congregation moved to Union Church in Smithfield (now Middleway, West Virginia) but they continued to use the cemetery at Stone’s Chapel throughout the 19th century.
As for the Calvinists, Stone’s Chapel was first mentioned in local Presbyterian records in 1878. Prior to 1853 when the Berryville Presbytery was established, pastors were provided by the Winchester Presbytery. The first pastor for Stone’s Chapel was Reverend J.H.C. Leach who was appointed in 1824. Over the years several more pastors were provided by the Winchester Presbytery. Then in September 1885, the local Berryville pastor agreed to conduct services twice a month at Stone’s Chapel – a morning service on the third Sunday of each month and an afternoon service on the first Sunday of each month. On July 31, 1886, Stone’s Chapel was established as a separate church starting with just fifteen (15) members, eleven (11) of which had transferred over from the Berryville Presbytery.
The chapel was named after Jacob Stone (formerly Stine) who donated land for the church cemetery which has about two hundred marked graves dating back to the 1700’s and includes the graves of at least three Revolutionary War soldiers. The first burial on record was the son of Daniel Hukedom on August 18, 1786. The deed which transferred the property from Jacob and Barbara Stone to the Trustees of the Lutheran and Calvinist Societies was recorded in 1793. Ownership and maintenance of the cemetery was taken over by the Clarke County Cemetery Association in the 1950’s. (Note: the church was also originally called Stine’s Chapel. The name was changed when Jacob Stine anglicized his name to Stone.)
The current building was constructed in 1848. In 1905, it was renovated to add the vestibule tower and the back addition for Sunday School. At that time a new slate roof was added along with stained glass windows, a mahogany pulpit and a pipe organ. (I think maybe what we thought was a choir loft or gallery must have been home to the pipe organ.)
Stone’s Chapel was an active Presbyterian church until it was decommissioned in 2000. The Chapel had its last meeting on Easter Sunday, April 24, 2000.
I had the opportunity to attend this last meeting along with other members of my husband’s family who all traveled up to Berryville to attend that final service with their mother. It was a warm spring day and a lovely way to end more than two centuries of worshipping God there with the local assembly although I have to admit that I was sorely disappointed that the cows didn’t come on over and sing along with us.
Today the church is owned and maintained by the Stone’s Chapel Memorial Association. Donations for the upkeep and preservation of the chapel can be made to:
Stone’s Chapel Memorial Association
Post Office Box 844
Berryville, VA 22611.
- Source information for this article was found at https://stoneschapel.org/history/ .
- For information about the Revolutionary War veterans buried at Stone’s Chapel, see https://stoneschapel.org/cemetery/ .
- Other historical information was taken from the Stone’s Chapel Program/Pamphlet handed out for the final service on April 24, 2000.
- Stone’s Chapel is located on Crum’s Church Road – Routes 632 and 761 in Clarke County.
It was a solemn day…..fitting for visiting an old church. We’d come up to Berryville for a funeral. I had heard of an old church that was purportedly the oldest Episcopal Church building still in use west of the Blue Ridge Mountains so it seemed like a great opportunity to drive on up to Millwood and find this church that sits at the intersection of Routes 617, 340, and 255. (I must say I was taken aback by the note that the church was “west” of the Blue Ridge Mountains….just lost my bearings for a moment and then realized where we were.)
We found the church with very little trouble. It was right there where a church should be (I suppose) and had always been – at least for the last 223 years. Certainly this church building is young by European or Asian standards where a church probably isn’t even considered to be old at all for maybe the first thousand years. But, for this young country, a church topping 200 is pretty ancient.
Old Chapel was listed on the National Registry of Historic Places in 1973. It was the home parish of Bishop William Meade for 25 years. Bishop Meade was born near White Post, VA. His father was Colonel Richard Kidder Meade, one of George Washington’s aides during the American Revolution. After the war, he sold his estate on the James River, bought a thousand acres in the Shenandoah Valley and moved there with his family. His son, William, became the third Bishop of Virginia.
Old Chapel is a single story building with a “3 Bay by 3 Bay” design. It is built on a fieldstone foundation and is itself built of coursed rubble limestone. It has a single gable shingle covered roof. The application for the church to be included in the National Registry says that the building includes an interior stone chimney but I do not recall seeing a chimney when we were there.
The arches above the doors are described as stone jack arches which (per Wikipedia) are a structural element in buildings to provide support above openings like doorways or windows. Jack arches are also called flat arches because they are not semicircular arches over the opening. They are used in the same manner as a lintel. The main doors are double-leaf paneled doors with five-light transoms above.
The windows are wooden with twelve-over-twelve sashes and are protected on the exterior by wooden batten shutters with iron strap hinges. The east end of the building contains two additional four-light frieze windows which provide light to the altar and pulpit in the interior of the building.
The high pulpit seemed very large for a church of this size (only about 40’ long). While it may be in the style of churches of that period, it really dominates the interior of this small church. On the other hand, you wouldn’t be able to miss that pulpit or the minister who would have a clear view of everyone in the church from the balcony on down….got to make sure no one is sleeping during the service. The carved wooden pulpit includes a plain wooden sounding board and an altar rail with turned wooden balusters. I love how the small windows on each side of the pulpit would have added a halo type effect to the minister as he performed his sermon although I think maybe the windows were there to add light to allow him to read his sermon notes and the Bible.
The pews are wooden and straight-backed obviously for maximum comfort during the sermon.
There is a small wooden paneled room at the rear of the church whose function we could not determine because that door was locked. (Note the double rows of nails in the wood paneling.)
There is a wooden balcony in the back of the church which is accessible only by a steep stair from the outside. While the research sites I checked did not explain this further, I believe the outside access to the balcony was probably built to allow slaves or other servants to enter the church and worship in the balcony or gallery without using the main doors with the rest of the congregation. (I do not know anything about the dead vine on the support column for the balcony. It was not growing there as it was cut at the floor. I suppose it might have been a decoration from a past service in the church…perhaps at Christmas or Easter.)
As I noted above, the beauty of the Old Chapel is in its simplicity and peacefulness. We found ourselves whispering while we explored inside the building. Isn’t that the way it is when one enters a sacred place? I thought of all the people who attended services here and the prayers over the last two centuries. I’m sure the ministers delivered powerful and rousing sermons that warned of the wages of sin and the absolute punishment for iniquity but, somehow, it seems to me that it is the silent whispered prayers for salvation and maybe a few soft hymns that linger in a church over the years filling the building with solitude and peace and hope for the future in an uncertain world.
We step outside into bright sunshine and explore Burwell Cemetery that surrounds Old Chapel and is historically noteworthy in its own right. The land for the cemetery was donated by Colonel Nathaniel Burwell in 1792.
The cemetery is known for its “ante-bellum” gravestone art and for the dignitaries buried there which include Col Burwell (of course) and Edmund Randolph who was a Virginia Governor and the first US Attorney General and John Esten Cooke (Civil War-era novelist). Bishop Meade, who ministered here for so long, had requested to be buried near his home church but died in Richmond and was buried there. His remains were later moved to the grounds of the Virginia Theological Seminary in Alexandria, VA. although other members of his family are buried here.
The cemetery also includes a Confederate War Dead Memorial as well as many Confederate soldiers’ graves along with the graves identified as slaves from the years before emancipation. I am always struck with the irony that the good, the evil, the saints, the sinners, the soldiers, and the slaves all end up buried together in the same cemetery for all of eternity.
Research Resources:
Birding Boomers 