"Frame raising" for restored African Baptist Church coming Saturday

It's July 16. Historic First Baptist Church on track to restore its predecessor church for 250th anniversary. Early turnout in primary to challenge Rob Wittman and Mark Warner "abysmal".

Clockwise, Connie Harshaw shows layout of church site, graveyard, foundation and signed bricks. (Williamsburg Watch and Connie Harshaw photos)

Williamsburg’s historic First Baptist Church is on track to finish the restoration of its predecessor African Baptist Church in time for its 250^th anniversary in October.

This Saturday, community members have been invited to help raise the frame for the restoration next to the historic Bray school on Nassau Street, on the original foundation of the African church. The Bray School opened in 1760 to educate free and enslaved Black children.

The original church site, along with 62 gravesites, had been paved over and served as a parking lot for buses until church members became involved.

Once it’s completed, the building and its gravesite will serve as a museum and interpretive site, with free admission.

“It’s not a Black thing. It’s not a White thing. It’s about the American story,” said Connie Matthews Harshaw, a founder of the Let Freedom Ring Foundation established to research the church’s history and educate the public about Williamsburg’s Black history.

First Baptist, one of America’s first Black churches, traces its roots to 1776, when a group of enslaved and freed Black worshippers organized a congregation, meeting in Green Spring Plantation. In 1781 they were organized as Baptist under Rev. Gowan Pamphlet, an enslaved man in Williamsburg. Eventually a member of the Cole family offered the congregation the use of a carriage house on Nassau Street in Williamsburg.

The African Baptist Church was built as a brick building in 1856 after a tornado tore down the former building in 1834, Harshaw said. Six years later it was renamed the First Baptist church of Williamsburg. First Baptist moved to its current location on Scotland Street in 1956.

Harshaw said the old site, now on land belonging to Colonial Williamsburg, had been paved over as a bus parking lot. Archaeologists from Colonial Williamsburg Foundation have been working with the group to restore it.

Descendants of former slaves insisted Colonial Williamsburg investigate whether graves remained on the site.

“The response that we got was, we don’t think so,” Harshaw said. “We said, ‘Not good enough’...because we know, based on our history, that not only did you discriminate against us in life, you also discriminated against us in death” and blacks were not buried with whites.

CW borrowed ground-penetrating radar that confirmed 62 graves on the site, she said. Several graves were exhumed and tested at the Institute for Historical Biology at William & Mary and at the University of Connecticut, confirming they were of sub-Saharan, or African descent, Harshaw said. The graves were mapped out and memorialized.

Harshaw said the restoration project has been an open process in consultation with local descendants.

“We call it community archaeology,” Harshaw said, adding she expects a large crowd at Saturday’s frame raising.

The wooden frame for the building will go up over a brick foundation that includes bricks signed by 4,000 people from across the country.

Harshaw said she got the idea from the workers who fire the bricks at CW, and she invited local descendants to participate in 2023. But the word got out, and “people flew in here” from across the country to sign bricks, Harshaw said. “People that were 80, 90, 100 years old.”

You can schedule a free tour of the Scotland Street church here.

What: Frame Raising of African Baptist church restoration building

When: Saturday, July 18, 9 a.m.

Where: Corner of Nassau and Francis streets

Who: Everyone is invited to participate