All of the early meetings of the St. Mark's Parish were mechanical. That is, the details of organizing and running the parish were attended to, but nowhere is there any mention of a minister or pastor. Readers, who were laymen, were hired to read sermons in the chapels. One of the items which was purchased was a book for parish use, for which they offered to pay 200 pounds of tobacco. This would be about 28 shillings, at 14 shillings per hundred weight of tobacco. A carpenter's wages were about two and a half shillings per day so by this measure paper was expensive.
The farm which had been purchased as a glebe was ordered surveyed. Then came a really big expenditure. John Hands was ordered to build a glebe house for 25,000 pounds of tobacco, one-half to be paid this year, and one-half the next year. It was decided to add fifteen acres of land to the two hundred acres of land that had already been purchased.
An important meeting of the vestry was held on 8 Oct 1731 for the purpose of laying the levy. The general process of doing this was to prepare a budget of the anticipated expenditures. For capital expenditures such as the glebe house, the cost was divided over two years. Sometimes, major costs were spread over three years. The civil authorities supplied the number of tithes in the parish. The vestry then had to take the total budget for the next year and divide by the number of tithes. This was how much each tithe had to pay.
Our Germans complained bitterly that they had to pay this tithe even though they made little use of the Church of England. The Lutherans in the Robinson River Valley felt that they could not pay the tithe to the Church of England and support their own church. When John Casper Stöver came to the Robinson River, a couple of years after the founding of St. Mark's parish, the Lutherans decided to try fund raising in Europe. The Virginia Assembly did make exceptions to the Church of England tithes in some periods of time for the Germans who were employing their own minister.
At the October meeting of the St. Mark's Vestry, the Rev. Purit was ordered to be paid six hundred pounds of tobacco, and a cask, for preaching this year at Germanna. This could only have been a few sermons. The Rev. Debutts was ordered to be paid 2,769 pounds for nine sermons this year. It was further ordered that the Rev. Debutts be paid 922 pounds of tobacco for three sermons this year. It appears that a sermon cost about three hundred pounds of tobacco, or about forty shillings. Forty shillings would be about two pounds sterling in Virginia currency.
The levy was determined to be thirty-five pounds of tobacco per tithable. According to the records, there were 704 tithables in the parish.
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.