Saint James Church, Accomac: Greek Revival on the Courthouse Green

The small town of Accomac sits at the center of Accomack County's long history as Virginia's Eastern Shore county seat, and the church facing the courthouse green tells that history in brick and plaster.

Saint James Episcopal Church was built between eighteen thirty-eight and eighteen forty-three, but its congregation reaches back much further. The original Saint James Chapel stood two miles south of town and was built in the colonial period, serving Anglican planters in one of Virginia's oldest organized parishes. When Accomac, then called Drummondtown, grew in importance as the county seat during the early nineteenth century, the congregation decided to move their church closer to the center of civic life. They demolished the old chapel and salvaged its bricks, bringing the literal material of the colonial building into the new one.

The result is a handsome Greek Revival structure whose design stands in visible contrast to the older Georgian and colonial forms common in this part of Virginia. The interior was decorated with trompe-l'oeil frescoes, painted illusionistic murals that created the impression of architectural depth and ornament where the actual walls were plain. It was an ambitious artistic choice for a rural Eastern Shore congregation, and it earned the church its place on the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen sixty-nine.

Accomac itself has one of the more intact courthouse landscapes in Virginia: the old debtors' prison, the clerk's office, the tavern, and the church all grouped around a common green in a pattern that would have been immediately legible to any eighteenth-century Virginian. The county seat was established here in the sixteen nineties as a central location between the Bay and the Atlantic, and the town's layout has changed surprisingly little in the three centuries since.

Driving through on Route Thirteen, it is easy to miss entirely. But the courthouse green and the church beside it are a small, complete picture of how Virginia organized civic and spiritual life in the centuries before the automobile rearranged everything.