Zion, Part 1

Bishop Francis Asbury

          Born in Staffordshire, England in August 1745, Francis Asbury worshiped at the local Methodist church as a youth. At the age of 18, he became a lay minister. When he was 22 years old, John Wesley appointed him to be a traveling preacher. In 1771, Asbury volunteered to come to America, where for the remaining 45 years of his life, he traveled about the country, preaching to what were often very large gatherings.
     Asbury was ordained as a bishop in 1784. He continued to travel throughout the newly independent United States, averaging six thousand miles a year on horseback or by horse-drawn conveyance. During his lifetime, the Methodist church in America grew from 1,200 to 214,000 members, and he ordained hundreds of preachers.
     His travels in Virginia included a number of passages through Spotsylvania County, since what are now Courthouse and Partlow roads were once part of the primary connection between Fredericksburg and Richmond. When passing through Spotsylvania, he often stopped at the home of his friend, George Arnold, whose home lay just south of modern Travelers Rest Baptist Church.

George Arnold house, 1880's (Spotsylvania County Museum)

     During the last years of his life, Bishop Asbury suffered from tuberculosis and the infirmities of old age. He became increasingly feeble, and he could no longer deliver his sermons with the same power he once commanded. In the late winter of of 1816, Asbury stopped in Richmond, where he delivered what proved to be his last sermon on March 24. A few days later, he continued his journey north, his intention being to reach Baltimore in time to attend the Methodist quarterly conference, scheduled to begin on May 2. However, as he made his way through southern Spotsylvania County, both the weather and his declining health obliged him to stop at the home of George Arnold. He died there on March 31, 1816.
     Bishop Asbury was buried at the Arnold farm. When the general conference convened in Baltimore in May 1816, it was decided that his remains should be brought to the city for permanent burial. His funeral procession in Baltimore was attended by thousands of mourners. Asbury's body was brought to Eutaw Street Methodist Church, where it was placed in a vault beneath the pulpit. And there he remained for forty years, until he was removed to his final resting place at Mount Olivet Cemetery.

Spotsylvania County, 1820

     By 1820, a meeting house was erected on the road once traveled by Francis Asbury. The Liberty Meeting House was located at or near the current site of Zion United Methodist Church. In the map detail shown above, the Liberty Meeting House can be seen on what is today Courthouse Road, just northeast of the location of the courthouse at that time, which was located on modern Lake Anna Parkway.
     By the early 1840's, Methodists in Spotsylvania County had already organized at least two churches, Shady Grove and Tabernacle. Although it is quite likely that Bishop Asbury preached at gatherings during his travels through Spotsylvania, the first mention of preaching at the Liberty Meeting House was found in an entry in the diary of James Pulliam dated May 1844. Previous research by members of Zion indicate that the Liberty Methodist Class--forerunner of Zion--consisting of twelve members, was organized on November 12, 1850. The meetings of this class originally took place in the homes of members in the vicinity of the current location of the courthouse.
     Over time, these gatherings became too large to be accommodated in people's houses, and services began to be held in the Liberty Meeting House. The first preacher of the church was John Wesley Hilldrup, whose father, Robert Taylor Hilldrup, was one of the founding members of Tabernacle Methodist Church. Seventeen-year-old John Wesley Hilldrup was licensed as an exhorter by the quarterly conference of the Spotsylvania Circuit in 1857. (Click here to read an excellent short biography of Reverend Hilldrup written by historian John Banks.)

John Wesley Hilldrup (Courtesy of Cindy Abbott)

     When the size of the congregation outgrew the meeting house, money was raised to build a new brick church, and construction began in 1857. When the church was completed in 1859 (at a cost of $2,800), it was named Liberty Methodist-Episcopal Church, South. Reverend Samuel Robertson was the minister at that time, and the names of forty members were on the church's rolls.
     The church was built on a plan that was common in the nineteenth century, with separate front entries for men and women. Inside the church, a wooden divider ran down the middle of the center pews, defining the seating areas off male and female members. The entrance on the left side of the building was intended for the use of the members' slaves, who would then take the stairs at the rear of the sanctuary leading to the balcony. The well-known photograph of Zion shown below was presumed to have been taken by Frederick Theo Miller, a photographer active in the Fredericksburg area 1860's-1880's. Miller's parents, John and Wilhelmina Miller, were early members of Tabernacle Methodist Church, and after the Civil War they donated one acre of land to erect a new church building for Tabernacle on Old Plank Road.

Zion Methodist Church

      In 1861, as the nation moved ever closer to civil war, Liberty renamed itself as "Zion Methodist-Episcopal Church, South." A large proportion of Zion's male members, both present and future, would enlist in Confederate regiments. Likewise, a number of Zion's pastors also volunteered for the Confederacy. Here is a list of those ministers who are known to have done so:

John Wesley Hilldrup served as a private in the 30th Virginia Infantry
James Erasmus McSparran served as a chaplain in the 11th Virginia Infantry
Henry Chapman Bowles served as a private in the 2nd Virginia Cavalry
Robert Blackwood Beadles served as a chaplain for the 55th Virginia Infantry
William Wilkerson Lear served as a private in the Richmond Howitzers
Richard Monroe Chandler served in the 9th Virginia Cavalry
William Amos Laughon served in the 30th Virginia Infantry

     When the South seceded, many in Spotsylvania were optimistic about the possibility of a speedy and favorable outcome to the war. Few could have foreseen the disruptions to the operation of the church that would remain a fact of life for the duration of the war. Fewer still could have predicted that the conflict would come to Zion's very door steps.
     The first occasion on which armed soldiers would enter Zion's sanctuary occurred in August 1862. On Tuesday, August 5, the brigade of Union General John Gibbon was divided into three parts. One of these, led by General Sullivan, included the 24th New York Infantry, commanded by Colonel Samuel Raymond Beardsley. At 5 p.m. that day, the three wings of Gibbon's brigade left their camps in Falmouth and crossed over into Fredericksburg. From there, they spread out to conduct a reconnaissance in force, with the intention of doing some damage to the Virginia Central Railroad, if possible.
     On Thursday, August 7, Colonel Beardsley and his regiment took up a position at Zion. "Our orders were to stay here & hold this point till this afternoon & then return to Falmouth," he wrote in a letter to his father that day. Beardsley and a number of his soldiers made themselves at home in the sanctuary, where he continued his letter: "I write this from the gallery of a country church which is situated in a grove about a half mile from the village (said village composed of a Court House, Clerks Office, and Tavern all of Brick, & one or two other houses of wood) which is a perfect bedlam below, as it is filled with soldiers some scuffling, some whistling, some playing cards on the little plain table in front of the pulpit, while one independent gentleman in his shirt sleeves occupies the ministers chair in the pulpit and is engaged in the laudable occupation of combing his hair with a pocket comb while he occasionally stops to admire his handy work through the medium of a little pocket looking glass."

Samuel Raymond Beardsley (Ancestry.com)

     Samuel Raymond Beardsley was born in Oswego, New York in 1814. Before the war, he worked as a merchant and miller, and in the 1850s was postmaster in Oswego. In 1863, Colonel Beardsley transferred to the 1st New Jersey Infantry. He died, while serving his country, in Stevensburg in Culpeper County on December 28, 1863. He lies buried in the Riverside Cemetery in Oswego.

     On the night of May 2, 1863, during the Battle of Chancellorsville, Confederate General Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson was shot by soldiers of the 18th North Carolina Infantry, who had mistaken Jackson and his aides as Union cavalry. Doctor Hunter McGuire amputated his left arm later that night. Within a few days, Jackson was placed in an ambulance and taken to "Fairfield," the home of his friend Thomas C. Chandler, near Guiney's Station in Caroline County. As the ambulance drove past Zion, local residents lined the road to watch as he passed by, little knowing that their hero had but a few more days to live.

Battle of Spotsylvania Court House (Wikipedia)

     When the Union army returned to Spotsylvania County a year later, the consequences for Zion Methodist Church would be much more dire. On May 4, 1864, Union General George Meade led approximately 120,000 troops over the Rapidan River and into Spotsylvania. The following day, Meade's army was met in the Wilderness by Confederate forces led by General Robert E. Lee. And so began a series of engagements that would rage in Spotsylvania until May 21.
     The Confederate cavalry moved southeast down Brock Road resisting the Union advance toward Spotsylvania Courthouse. When the vanguard of Lee's army, traveling down Shady Grove Church road, reached Laurel Hill, they entrenched and awaited the first Federal assault. It would not be long in coming. Beginning May 8, the two armies were in constant contact with each other, and titanic battles occurred almost daily, resulting in over 31,000 casualties.
     By May 11, division commander Henry Heth had established his headquarters at Zion. That evening General Lee also arrived, and over time other general officers and their staffs came and went from the church. General Ambrose Powell Hill, who was compelled by ill health to temporarily relinquish command of the Third Corps, arrived by ambulance. General Jubal Early, who was named as Hill's replacement as corps commander, was also nearby. Over the next several days, Early's soldiers encamped between the courthouse and the church. The cavalry division of General William Henry Fitzhugh Lee also spent time at the intersection of Court House and Massaponax Church roads and on the church grounds.
     At least one, and possibly two telescopes were set up at the windows in the slaves' balcony, providing a good view of Union activity at Myer's Hill, about a mile away. In the map detail shown above, the line of sight between Zion and Myer's Hill is evident. Off to the left, it was also possible to observe the movements of General Ambrose Burnside's Ninth Corps.
     The coming and going of Confederate generals and their staffs, not to mention the presence of large bodies of soldiers in the immediate vicinity of Zion, attracted the attention of Union forces nearby. Soon, a fusillade of artillery and small arms fire raked the church and its grounds. The windows were shot out, and significant damage was done to the church's roof and brick exterior. Somehow in the midst of all this tumult, General Robert E. Lee found it possible to take a nap inside the church on May 14th, one of the few times during the war when he slept under a roof.
     As the fighting continued and the casualties mounted, the church's sanctuary was pressed into service as a hospital. All of the pews (most of the original ones are still in use today) were moved outside in order to provide space for the wounded and dying who were brought in for care. Operations, including amputations, would have been performed in the sanctuary. The blood of these unfortunate men, which stained the floors, would remain visible for almost one hundred years.
     On May 15th, General Ambrose Wright's brigade of Georgians was ordered to make a reconnaissance toward Myer's Hill. This movement was not well executed by General Wright, and upon encountering stiff resistance after marching a short distance down Massaponax Church Road, he led his brigade back to their starting point near Zion. An outraged General Hill met with Lee at the church, and demanded that a court of inquiry be convened to investigate Wright's conduct. Lee's reply to Hill exemplified the temperament and wisdom for which the Confederate commander was well known: "These men are not an army; they are citizens defending their country. General Wright is not a soldier; he is a lawyer. I cannot do many things that I could do with a trained army. The soldiers know their duties better than the general officers do, and they have fought magnificently. Sometimes I would like to mask troops and deploy them, but if I were to give the proper order, the general officers would not understand it; so I have to make the best of what I have and lose much time in making dispositions. You understand all of this, but if you humiliated General Wright, the people of Georgia would not understand. Besides, whom would you put in his place? You'll have to do what I do. When a man makes a mistake, I call him to my tent, talk to him, and use the authority of my position to make him do the right thin the next time."
     On May 21, the armies began withdrawing south toward the North Anna River. For all intents and purposes, the war in Spotsylvania was over. The final months of the Civil War would be fought in the trenches around Richmond and Petersburg and on the agonizing march to Appomattox. Although the fighting had ceased, it would be a long time before any normalcy returned to the lives of the citizens of Spotsylvania. The economy was shattered, money was scarce, a great many men had been killed or permanently injured, and a large number of farms and public buildings--including churches--had been destroyed or rendered unusable for quite some time. A long period of rebuilding had just begun.