Morattico Baptist Church
This is a virtual tour of the Morattico Baptist Church in Lancaster County. Charismatic early Baptist preacher Lewis Lunsford founded the church in January of 1778. Sixteen adults and two children were charter members of the congregation. They did not yet have a church building—they met at Morattico Hall, the home of local landholder Alexander Hunton.
The Baptist faith was experiencing a surge in popularity in Virginia during this era. Between 1760 and 1776 about ninety Baptist churches came into being in Virginia’s Tidewater and Piedmont areas alone. Preachers such as Lunsford helped drive this growth. Described as “the Wonderful Boy,” Lunsford drew huge crowds to his sermons while he was still a teenager. By 1790 Morattico had grown from a small congregation to the largest Baptist church in Virginia with 495 members.
The Morattico congregation, like many Baptist congregations of the time, was diverse, with members from the gentry as well as enslaved and free Black people. One prominent congregant, Robert Carter III, became a controversial figure in Virginia for his decision to free 452 people he enslaved. This was the largest individual manumission made in the United States before the Civil War.
Early Baptists in Virginia, including Lunford, faced legal and extralegal persecution, in part because of their challenge to the social order. In 1775, he was fined for preaching “Contrary to Law.” A pistol-wielding mob stormed one of Lunsford’s sermons in 1778, fighting with the crowd of about 700 people and forcing Lunsford to hide in a congregant’s house.
Four Baptist churches were formed from Morattico’s congregation in the first twenty-five years of its existence. This makes Morattico “a mother church,” a congregation that creates more churches and inspires converts.
While the Morattico church came into being in 1778 without a physical structure, there was most likely some kind of sanctuary built on the property in the years following. In 1856 Addison Hall, another significant Morattico pastor, supervised the construction of the current church building. Hall served as the pastor of Morattico during another period of rapid growth—his notes indicate that he personally baptized 1,768 people.
One of Hall’s daughters, Henrietta Hall Shuck, was the first American female missionary to China. Her notes and letters about her time as a missionary were published in 1852 as Scenes in China: or, Sketches of the Country, Religion, and Customs of the Chinese. She described the Chinese people as “ignorant but interesting.”
Architecturally Morattico is a simple brick structure, constructed with bricks made on site. It is similar in style to the Massaponax Baptist Church, which has been described as a restrained brick Greek Revival structure. Richard Edmonds Sr., a carpenter who also worked on the nearby Carter house, carved Morattico’s elaborate interior woodwork. The main church building was completed in 1856 and the educational building was added in 1955. The church is still in use with an active congregation.
