Glebes

Here’s a really tough question.

Where in the District of Columbia is there a glebe land?

What a minute.  Glebe land in the District?   That can’t be.   Glebe lands were owned by parishes in colonial times.   By the 1810s, they were sold off.    

Well, Virginia, there is a glebe land in DC, something I did not know until research on another topic took me to Rock Creek Cemetery in upper DC.  

Turns out the cemetery is on land owned by St. Paul’s Church as part of their Rock Creek Parish Glebe.   It says so, right on the updated National Register of Historic Places registration form.    

The area making up the glebe consists of the church yard burial ground and cemetery, brick church, parish hall, gate house, gates and fences, watchman’s house, and service building, all of which are contributing resources. 

To learn this blew me away.   A glebe in our time is something so anachronistic, yet it’s so cool that a glebe land still exists.  To boot, it is a cemetery, and a place that holds the church, a Montessori school and the Interfaith Council (photo).    Notable interments include Sinclair Lewis, Gore Vidal and Alice Roosevelt Longworth.   Augustus Saint-Gaudens sculpture that honors the wife of Henry Adams adds emotion and pause.   

Glebes were once an integral part of colonial life in Virginia, a time when the Anglican Church (Church of England) held sway over the vast majority of Virginians.  The formation of a parish in the colony typically preceded the formation of a county.   For example, Truro Parish, founded in 1732, came a decade before the formation of Fairfax County, and included the same lands.    Planters like George Washington and George Mason held power as vestrymen, but they also bore responsibility to help the parish and the people.

In their book, “The Glebe Houses of Colonial Virginia,” Williard J. Webb and Anne C. Webb, tell us each parish was required by law to provide its minister with a glebe (farm or plantation) and a glebe house.  

On the importance of glebe lands, Prince William historian Jim Bish describes them this way.

The glebe lands usually were lands that were set aside for the church to earn income.  Sometimes these were established when a Parish was established and sometimes landowners willed some of their property to the church at their death which added to the church glebes.  The church then usually received annual rents from these lands or they could be sold to help finance a larger financial obligation.  

There were about 90 glebe houses built in the seventeenth and eighteenth century in Virginia.  Only ten glebe homes have survived but they are long since placed in private hands.    

Pohick Church, located near Fort Belvoir, was the home base for the Truro Parish.  An historical marker in nearby Newington tells us the second Truro Parish Glebe House was built there in 1760.   Its glebe lands spread out on either side of what is now Newington Road. The house burned down in 1875 and the land now makes up the suburban neighborhood.

The Webb’s book also includes the Glebe House in Arlington. It should, however, be noted the house burned down in 1815.   What lies there today is a rebuild and addition.   In the judgement of Calder Loth, the walls of the present Glebe House were erected using previously used bricks.   The home is private but the house and yard on a crown does maintain a sense of something once special.

Before we get back to the St. Paul Rock Creek glebe, it’s worth noting that the historic Glebe House in Arlington holds a distinction that is apropos to a glebe located in the District.   

As mentioned, as part of a law passed in 1802, Virginia confiscated the glebe lands and all were sold off.   Except one, that is.   The Fairfax Parish, which included Christ Church in Alexandria, pushed back against the law.   According to “Lee of Virginia,” Edmund Jennings Lee, who lived a short walk from Christ Church, argued successfully the Fairfax Glebe still owned the glebe house and land because Alexandria County was located in the new federal District of Columbia.   It wasn’t until 1815 that the wardens of Christ Church in Alexandria sold the glebe land to Walter Jones and John Mason.

The story of the Rock Creek Parish Glebe and Cemetery is a fascinating one, giving us sort of a DMV before it was the DMV.   We learn its history goes back further than some might think.  

In the 1690s, more than a half century before Alexandria was founded, a church was built at modern day Fort Washington, just a few miles south of present day National Harbor.  

We know this church as St. John's.  It was first named Broad Creek, named after the body of water that flows south of the church in Fort Washington.     A straight line to the west would go through Hybla Valley.   John Addison, whose manor home on Oxon Hill stood where the MGM Hotel does today, provided money and leadership to the vestry.  

The increase in population in the area there prompted the creation of a new parish.  South of the Eastern Branch (Anacostia River) remained the St. John's Parish (formerly Piscataway Parish).  North of the river became the new parish (Prince George's Parish) on land at present-day District of Columbia, Prince George's County, and all of Frederick, Montgomery and others in western Maryland.   A new wooden parish chapel was built around 1726 at present-day Rock Creek Cemetery.  

As the nomination form points, the glebe land produced income for farming and woodcutting.  A new brick church went up in 1776 and became the center of the cemetery, as it is today.   A fire in 1921 destroyed some of the church.  A rebuild includes the surviving foundation and walls of the 1776 church.

Francis Scott Key gave legal advice to the Rock Creek Parish vestry on their legal rights to the Glebe.    Key is best known for his DC and Maryland stories, but he also has footprints in Alexandria.   For those reading the State Highway marker on King Street near the Virginia Theological Seminary, they will take note Key was among those helping the institution in its early years.    A history of St. Paul’s Church in Alexandria (Ruth Lincoln Kaye) points out Key, Bushrod Washington, Dr. Kilmer and other members of the vestry first met at St. Paul’s Church on Pitt Street in Old Town.

Taken from the sources, here are some standout aspects of this remarkable history.    

Historical Markers

"St. Paul's Rock Creek" is the oldest church and the only colonial church in the present District of Columbia.

Founded originally as a preaching mission, with first services held in this vicinity the 2nd Sunday in May 1712.

 On September 18, 1719, Colonel John Bradford, Maryland Tobacco planter, gave 100 acres of land on which to build a chapel and to serve as a glebe for the support of the ministers and work of the church. 

The glebe, now Rock Creek Cemetery, is the Hallowed resting place of many eminent persons who contributed to American History.

Here, the first church edifice within the future district of Columbia was erected in 1719; a "chapel of ease" of St. John's Church, Broad Creek. 

In 1771, the General Assembly assessed the parish 96,000 pounds of tobacco for a brick structure, which was completed after the Revolution. 

Partially destroyed by fire 1921, it was immediately rebuilt, incorporating the original brick walls. 

EHT Traceries

EHT wrote the updated and consolidated nomination form.   Coming in it is 68 pages long, it is a tour de force. 

One of the distinctive and almost unique features of the glebe is that it has retained most of its original acreage, donated close to three centuries ago for the support of the church.

Located since 1800 within the boundaries of the District of Columbia, Rock Creek Parish Glebe is the only glebe within Washington, D.C.  

The 85-acre glebe at Rock Creek Parish is one of only three surviving colonial-era glebes dating from provincial Maryland.

Used since its pledging in 1719 by a parishioner to provide benefice (support) for the parish, the glebe has been in the possession of a single owner longer than any other property in the District of Columbia and stands as one of the most intact colonial-era glebes in the United States. 

Rock Creek Cemetery, which began as a church yard burial ground, is the oldest cemetery in the District of Columbia with interments dating from the eighteenth century. It continues as an active cemetery, and is believed to be one of the oldest cemeteries in operation in the United States.

The land surrounding the church is primarily devoted to burials of members of the congregation, local residents, and transient members of the federal government. 

DC Preservation 

One of the earliest Colonial period roads was Rock Creek Church Road. 

Other notable interments

The Joseph Nourse family (his wife, son, daugther-in-law and eleven  grandchildren) lie here, their plot seen in the photo above of the church.  Nourse was the Register of the Treasury for the first six Presidents.      

Some of the Fairfax family is also in Section A.   They include Charles, 10th Lord Fairfax and John Contee, 11th Lord Fairfax.   A memoir stone is there for Albert 12th Lord Fairfax.  Hugh Fairfax, author of "Fairfax of Virginia: The Forgotten Story of America's only Peerage," told me -   "Albert 12th Lord, my grandfather is buried at our family graveyard in Bilbrough, Yorkshire."

 

 

 

 

 

Comments

[Carinr]

Thank you for covering Rock Creek Parish and Cemetery! A couple of additional notes:

The history of the Anglican Church in Maryland is of course quite different than it was in Virginia. In Maryland, the Church of England was only established (as in, became the official church) in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution, when England cracked down on the Catholic-founded, religiously tolerant Maryland because of ecclesiastical politics at home. So the founding of an Anglican parish in the 1690s, with offshoots and daughter churches in the next couple of decades, is no coincidence. In Maryland, the whole apparatus of Anglican parishes and their glebes as part of the administrative structure of the colony dates from that time.

The St. Paul's vestry's decision to allot about 2/3 of its glebe to the formation of a cemetery (as opposed to the longstanding churchyard right around the church itself) was part of the Rural or Garden Cemetery movement of the mid-19th century, as was Georgetown's somewhat earlier Oak Hill. Rock Creek Cemetery was nonsectarian from the beginning and was designed, successfully, to attract Washington's elite to spend eternity there. The conjunction of a nonsectarian Garden Cemetery with a still-functioning Episcopal parish and churchyard, all within a glebe, is, as you note, pretty nifty. For many decades, the cemetery supported the parish; now, with most of the cemetery plots sold and the old endowments not up to modern expenses, both church and cemetery sometimes struggle to make ends meet. It doesn't help that church is nestled deep in the glebe, which is tucked away where traffic whizzes by on North Capitol Street on one side and the gate is not easy to find amid neighborhood streets on the other, but it is well worth seeking out. The tours they offer during WalkingTown DC each year are fantastic.

[Jaybird's Jottings]

Thank you for a wonderful and informative reply!

I’ve often hoped for a book that would compare and contrast the religious approaches in colonial Virginia and Maryland.

Jay

[Carinr]

Jay, me too! Or even just a history of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, which would be more manageable, since Anglicanism in Virginia is already so well documented. I worked a bit on Rock Creek Parish's history for its 300th anniversary celebrations in 2012 and in that context started looking at the prehistory of the Diocese of Washington, which wasn't created until 1895. Maybe I'll undertake such a thing, after that novel I've been meaning to write...

Carin

[Jaybird's Jottings]

Sounds good Carin!