The parish of St. Mark's was formed in 1730 from St. George parish. The latter had been coterminous with the county of Spotsylvania, which meant that it covered the area of present day Spotsylvania, Orange, Greene, Culpeper, Madison, and Rappahannock counties. The principal church building was at Germanna, where Alexander Spotswood had decided that the county seat and church would be located. With Spotswood in residence, and with the courthouse either in his home or nearby, and with the church close by, Germanna was a thriving frontier community. There was only one problem. Except for the Germans who lived to the west of Germanna, most of the citizens of the county lived to the east. That is, the county seat and the church were not centrally located in a colony where attendance at church was compulsory. In short, Germanna was very inconveniently located for St. George Parish.
When St. Mark's was created it was to consist of the present counties of Orange, Greene, Culpeper, Madison, and Rappahannock. The parish of St. George was limited to the area which is now Spotsylvania County. Germanna fell into the new parish. In 1735, Orange County was formed and it was made conterminous with St. Mark's, except that the area was extended across the Blue Ridge Mountains to the Shenandoah Valley. At least briefly, the church at Germanna was the principal church in St. Mark's parish, which was larger in area than the present state of Rhode Island. (Though this church was built after the First Colony had left Germanna, the Second Colony, for a few years, was located within a few miles.)
Attending church was not easy, so there were subsidiary churches or chapels. These usually did not have regular ministers, but employed readers, a lay person who read sermons. There were also Houses of Ease, where attendance fulfilled one's legal obligations for church attendance.
The parish was run by a Board of Vestrymen. These men, usually twelve, were appointed by the colony to launch the Vestry, but thereafter the board elected its own replacements. This was a position of honor and one served without pay. The duties were not all that strenuous, as the Vestry met only a few times each year. The Vestry was both an agent of the colony and an agent of the church. Separation of church and state was an idea which would not come to Virginia for another fifty years. The Vestry had the power of taxation, with the full support of the colony, to raise its monies. Among its functions, which today we would think of as civil functions, the established church (the Church of England) was to record births and marriages and to take care of the poor. The Vestry kept minutes of the decisions of the Vestrymen and several books of the minutes have been preserved in Virginia. A few records of births and marriages have been maintained, but not nearly as many as the minutes.
I have a transcription of St. Mark's Vestry Minute Book and I will use it in making some comments here.
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.