Saint George's Church, Pungoteague: The Eastern Shore's Oldest House of Worship

The Eastern Shore of Virginia is a narrow strip of land that the Chesapeake Bay and the Atlantic Ocean have been slowly dissolving for centuries. English settlers crossed the Bay from Jamestown as early as the sixteen twenties, and they brought their faith with them. The building you are near in Pungoteague is the oldest standing house of worship on Virginia's Eastern Shore, begun by seventeen thirty-eight.

The Anglican parish here predates the building by many decades, organized in the early colonial period when this flat, fertile ground was among the most productive tobacco country in Virginia. By the mid-seventeen thirties the congregation had outgrown whatever structure they had been using and began construction of a new brick church. Construction was under way by seventeen thirty-eight, and the building reached its present form by seventeen sixty-one, making it one of the more elaborate church interiors in the whole colony. A silver communion service, still preserved by the parish, is inscribed This belongs to the Parish of Accomack and dated seventeen thirty-four to seventeen thirty-five, predating the present building and connecting this congregation to an even longer liturgical history.

The Civil War left a particular mark. Union forces occupied Virginia's Eastern Shore early in the conflict, protecting a strategic telegraph line that ran the length of the peninsula. Soldiers were billeted throughout the region, and at Saint George's they stabled their horses inside the church itself, tying animals in the old wooden box pews. The damage to the pews was severe. What you see today inside the church represents generations of careful repair and stewardship by a congregation that never abandoned the building.

The church was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy. It remains an active Episcopal parish, holding services in the same brick walls where colonial planters once sat with their tobacco-stained hands folded in their laps, watching the light come through the same windows on a quiet Eastern Shore morning.