Pohick Church: Washington's Parish
Near Dc Northern Virginia, Virginia
Standing in the woods of Lorton, Virginia, is a Georgian brick church that George Washington helped design, helped build, and worshipped in for more than two decades. Pohick Church is one of the oldest places of continuous worship in Northern Virginia, and its story runs from the colonial era straight through to the Civil War and back.
Washington joined the vestry of Pohick Church in seventeen sixty-two, when the congregation still met in an earlier wooden building. By seventeen sixty-seven the vestry had voted to build a permanent structure. Washington threw himself into the project with the same methodical energy he brought to everything: he selected the site, he influenced the plans, and he served alongside fellow vestrymen George Mason and George William Fairfax as an active supervisor of construction from seventeen sixty-nine until the church was completed in seventeen seventy-four. Parish records show Washington attending twenty-three of the thirty-five vestry meetings held between his election and the start of the Revolution.
The colonial vestry was not merely a religious body. It managed the parish's obligations to widows, orphans, the poor, and the sick. Serving on it was a civic duty as much as a spiritual one, and the men of Pohick reflected the Fairfax County gentry who ran the colony.
The church was still standing when the Civil War tore through Fairfax County. Union troops from the Second Michigan Volunteers raided it on November twelfth, eighteen sixty-one. What followed was methodical destruction. Soldiers stripped the pews for firewood, smashed the windows, carved their names into the doorposts, and used the interior as a stable. One eyewitness account described the interior as unrecognizable within ten minutes of the troops' arrival.
Restoration began in the years after the war, proceeded in stages through the eighteen nineties and early nineteen hundreds, and was finally completed in the Georgian Revival style by around nineteen seventeen. The Mount Vernon Ladies' Association helped fund the effort. The names of Washington and Mason, carved into the building's stonework, survived.
