St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, Norfolk
This is a virtual tour of St. Paul’s Episcopal Church, the only surviving pre-revolutionary building in downtown Norfolk. Expansions and architectural changes have been made to the church over the years, but the original 1739 brick structure survives.
White settlers of the Elizabeth River Parish selected the site where St. Paul’s stands for a burial ground and church in 1640. Colonists completed what was then called the Borough Church in 1739, but burials on site began far earlier—headstones in the cemetery date to the late 1600s.
The Borough Church famously survived the British naval bombardment of Norfolk in the early days of the Revolutionary War. On January 1, 1776, a cannonball fired from a warship struck and became lodged in the church’s exterior wall. On February 6, after weeks of plunder and damage from British and Patriot forces, the Virginia Committee of Safety ordered that what remained of Norfolk be burned to prevent it supplying the British. The interior structure of the Borough Church went up in smoke. Only the walls remained standing.
The Virginia Assembly approved a fundraising effort to rebuild the church in 1785. The city restored the building and constructed a new roof, and by 1786 the Borough Church was again in active use.
Between 1789 and 1803 conflicts between two rectors led to the splitting of the Borough Church congregation. In 1803 the remaining Borough Church attendees scattered. From 1805 to 1827, Norfolk’s racially diverse first Baptist congregation leased and held services in the Borough Church space. In 1832 Episcopal reverend Henry W. Ducachet began a rehabilitation of the old Borough Church building. In 1833 Bishop Richard Channing Moore reconsecrated it as St. Paul’s Episcopal Church.
When historian Benson J. Lossing visited St. Paul’s while researching his Pictorial Field-Book of the Revolution (1850–1852), he noted that “a large cavity made by a cannon-ball hurled from the British” remained in the wall of the church. According to the recollected account of a Norfolk resident published in the August 1, 1875, edition of the Norfolk Virginian, in 1848 a St. Paul’s vestryman named William W. Lamb instructed one of the people he enslaved to try to find the cannonball. The enslaved man, whose name was not identified in the article, was able to dig it up right below the break in the wall. The church later plastered it back where it had originally struck. The re-lodged cannonball became a site of interest for tourists, and St. Paul’s added an explanatory plaque.
