The Virginia State Library and Archives publishes "A Guide to Church Records in the Archives Branch." They have 320 "items" in their collection. The Guide also includes a few words on the history of the denominations. This note starts some selections from these comments.
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Laws enacted by the House of Burgesses concerning the Society of Friends in Virginia were very stringent. From 1659 to the 1670's, steps were taken to prohibit Friends from entering Virginia, and to expel those who were present. They were not allowed to publish or circulate tracts, and meetings were limited to a maximum of five people. The years of greatest persecution were the period where they grew most rapidly. In 1672, a visit by George Fox, the founder of the Society, helped the Friends to organize. When the Anglican Church was disestablished in 1786, the Friends went into a period of decline. One reason was the lack of a statewide organization (meeting).
The Presbyterians settled in Virginia as early as 1684. Under the Act of Toleration of 1689, Josiah Mackie, a Presbyterian, qualified. The group remained very small until the Scotch-Irish migration into the Shenandoah Valley in the 1730's. Because they strengthened the frontier, their religion was tolerated; however, when the Presbyterians came east over the Blue Ridge Mountains, the laws controlling dissenters were enforced against them. Samuel Morris, in Hanover County, led discussion groups which were reinforced by the visit of Rev. William Robinson of the New Light Presbytery. Encouragement to these fledgling groups came from the north, out of state. One controversy of the Presbyterians was the Old Side-New Side argument. Old Side people argued that the church should be controlled by constituted authority and the ministers should be educated and ordained in the orthodox tradition. The New Siders held that ordained ministers could be people who were converted by a religious experience, and who could preach wherever the Holy Spirit led them.
Two groups of Baptists existed in Virginia prior to the Revolutionary War. The Regulars generally complied with colonial laws requiring dissenters to register and to list their preaching assignments. The Separatists traced their heritage to the Great Awakening, a series of revivals in New England in the 1730's and 1740's. At first, they were known as New Lights but, as many of the churches were founded by people who withdrew from the Anglican Church, they became known as Separatists. Slightly later, this name was used by those who withdrew from the Baptist churches on the question of infant baptism; those who withdrew to form new Baptist churches were thus called Separatists. At the time of the disestablishment of the Anglican Church, the various factions of the Baptists were reunited in Virginia.
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.