St. Luke's Church, also known as Old Brick Church, or Newport Parish Church, is a historic church building, located in the unincorporated community of Benns Church, near Smithfield in Isle of Wight County, Virginia, United States. It is the oldest church in Virginia and oldest church in British North America of brick construction. According to local tradition the structure was built in 1632, but other evidence points to a date of 1682; see Dating controversy.
On October 15, 1966, St. Luke's was designated a National Historic Landmark and was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in recognition of its historic and architectural distinction. In 1957 President Dwight D. Eisenhower designated the site a National Shrine in concert with the 350th anniversary of Jamestown.
Since 1954 Historic St. Luke's Restoration, doing business as Historic St. Luke's Church, is a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization that maintains, preserves, promotes, and interprets the 17th-century, 100-acre historic site. Historic St. Luke's does not receive any federal, state, or municipal funding. All funding comes from private corporations, foundations, and individuals.
Architecture
Once known as "Old Brick Church", St. Luke's is described by College of William & Mary professor and Colonial Williamsburg Foundation architectural historian Carl Lounsbury as an Artisan Mannerism style in which masons and other builders both designed and built without the guiding hand of an architect. Other examples of such architecture include Bacon's Castle in nearby Surry County, Virginia and exhibit Cavalier or Royalist sensibilities. St. Peter's Church in New Kent, Virginia is a later, less ornate style reflecting the Glorious Revolution of Dutch-English monarchs William & Mary.
The plan is that of a single room ( × ) with a twenty-foot-square () tower at the west end. The walls are laid in a rough Flemish bond. The buttresses with sloping set-offs project prominently from three bays of the north and south walls. At both the east and west end of the church are crow-stepped gables, while unadorned turrets, corbelled slightly at their bases, decorate the corners of the building.
The original windows were replaced in the 19th century. Those Victorian windows remain in place today. The stained glass windows above the altar were produced in Germany. The current doors were added in the 1950s.
Architectural details
Parish affiliation
Newport Parish dates from the formation of Warrosquyoake plantation. The details of parish and political entities are as follows: 1629 Warrosquyoake Parish formed 1634 Included in the list of original shires 1634 Isle of Wight County formed 1643 Divided into upper (Warrosquyoake) and lower parish (Newport) 1733 Brunswick Country formed from Isle of Wight County 1743 Lower sections of Warrosquyoake and Newport Parishes combined as Newport Parish and upper sections into Nottoway Parish (later Nottoway Parish became Southampton Parish). 1749 Southampton County formed from Isle of Wight CountyRawlings 31 1836 Christ Episcopal Church of Newport Parish in Smithfield, Virginia
Architecture
The architecture of Newport Parish Church is a combination of the 17th century room churchThe Church architecture article in Wikipedia mentions the room church and the auditory church. (See also the article in Wikipedia on Rood screens) embellished with Gothic features. Unlike the English Gothic church characterized by separate wings containing the nave, aisles and chancel, the room church reduces these divided spaces into a single rectangular space.Upton 58: a relatively deep rectangular (in Wren's churches) or shallower rectangular room in rural English and Virginia churches. All Virginia vernacular churches employ this room structure. In the case of Newport Parish, a simplified form of a rood screen, as in several extant English room churches, separates the nave from the chancel.Upton 56–57 In fact, in this edifice, the oldest Anglican church in the state, the essential features of the room church are all in place. They are: Rectangular building General ratio of 2:1 length to width Oriented east-west Main entrance via west door Southeast vestry door Single story sidewall elevation East window.Upton 59
Gothic features are principally in embellishments to the structure rather than major structural details: steeply pitched A-roof with crow-stepped or curvilinear gables Y-tracery windows with brick modillions semi-circular arches at doorways with "embryonic pediments" beamed ceilings with plaster plain cornices porches, buttresses, or towers.Rawlings 3–4
Brickwork
The church itself is east-west and north-south in the clear.Rawlings 31: in the clear refers to measurements made inside the walls; church contracts often specified this measurement.
The church is laid in Flemish bond in water tables, walls, and tower. The tower is an integral part of the structure unlike that of the Jamestown Church tower whose unfinished mortar joints on its east wall indicate that it was erected after the main church building and the clearly documented, added tower at St. Peter's Church, New Kent County. Unlike any other standing Virginia colonial church, there are two water tables each nine bricks high. The transitions from the water tables are accomplished using beveled bricks. There are no glazed headers in the walls that are wide at the foundations, thick in the walls, and thick in the tower.Rawlings 32
Three buttresses with three ramps each support the north and south sides of the church, separating the walls into three bays and a chancel, each of which contains a Y-tracery window. The bevels of the buttresses follow the water table in height, each being nine bricks tall. The church is singular among standing churches in having buttresses: the only other documented buttresses are at the Jamestown Church of 1639 to 1647 and the second Bruton Parish Church of 1680.Upton 60: Upton asserts that this church was actually constructed after 1676.
The walls continue for 38 courses above the water tables. Obvious repairs are present throughout the building due to a storm that collapsed the walls in 1887 and include: entire upper east wall crow steps and towers on the gables windows on the south and north walls east side of the tower along the gables two elliptical windows on the north and south sides of the porch sills of some of the principal windows.
Two thousand bricks from the Jamestown Church of 1639–1647 were included in repairs during the 1890s.
Roof
The present roof, replaced in the 1950sUpton 42 is constructed internally of massive tie-beams and a plastered ceiling, though the original was most likely a principal rafter roof similar to that of the third Bruton Parish Church.Upton 242: see pp. 44 for diagrams of church roof structures in Virginia: If Upton is correct, the current footings of the beams and other roof underpinnings are not accurate representations. The roof beams are decorated with chamfer and lamb's tongue moldings. The present slate shingles are, of course, not the original roofing material which most likely was cedar shingles or clapboards painted or covered with tar.Upton 103
The ends of the east gable consist of a corbelled turret on the outside corners with eight crow steps rising to the middle. The crow steps on the west wall are truncated by the presence of the tower and so have only 1½ steps. Other colonial structures with gables are few and include Bacon's Castle(1665) the second Bruton Parish Church, (1680s),See Upton p 39 for the image of this church and St. Peter's Church, New Kent County (1701) all of which are characterized by Flemish curved gables instead of crow step gables. All of the cornices are modern replacements.Upton 61–62
Tower
The tower, the only one known to be an original feature of a colonial church in Virginia,Upton 61 stands to the west of the main church building and is east-west and north-south at the outside ground level. It is tall and consists of three stories. The corners of the first two stories of the three-story tower are embellished by rusticated brick quoins of a row of two horizontally raised bricks divided by a projecting row of thin bricks with a vertical V in the center. The third story, presumably added some time after the rest of the tower,Rawlings 32–33 is surmounted by a slate shingled, hipped roof with a modern weather vane at the crest. The southern and northern faces of the tower bear a single window on each story. From bottom to top they are: 1) an open oval ellipse three feet horizontally and two feet vertically; 2) a Y-tracery window matching the principal windows; and 3) a compass widow with a brick arch and louvers. The west façade is identical except that the lower story contains a round bricked arch with a simple, whitewashed tympanum above it.Rawlings 34: In the 15th Century English Reformation, previously decorated features of churches such as rood screens were whitewashed as were elaborate tympanums. The bottom of the tower is open and serves as a porch.
Windows
The windows of St. Luke's Church are unique among colonial windows and the major element that gives the edifice an artisan mannerism character. The east window is a "great lancet consisting of two tiers of four circular-headed windows." The two bottom courses consist of rows of four round-headed windows above which are a row of gothic arched windows, three diamond-shaped windows, and a pair of elongated, horizontal triangles as spandrels.Rawlings 33 Each of the east windows as well as the Y-tracery windows in the rest of the church are separated by modillions of molded, rubbed brick consisting of an ovolo (convex) and fillet (flat) shapes and an ovolo sill. There is a small, elliptical window above the great window. The presence of a great window is indicated in a few other, early churches in Virginia, namely St. Peter's, New Kent County (1701) and Upper and Lower Middlesex Country churches (1714 and 1717).Rawlings Table of Contents Later churches without exception had chancel windows matching the principal windows on the north and south walls.
There are eight lancet windows on the north and south edifices and three on the tower (second story south, west, and north faces) similar in general construction to the great window. They each consist of a pair of steeply arched windows with a single, smaller spandrel window completing the arch and separated with rubbed brick in the form of ovolo and fillet moldings. The sills are also of identical ovolo molded bricks.
The present Tiffany-style, stained glass windows, despite local tradition to the contrary,Meade 300 do not replicate the original material that was diamond-paned, leaded glass. No Virginia colonial church had stained glass windows.
Doorways
The church displays the first recorded instance of the use of a main west entrance and a south entry placed in the extreme southeast corner of the church. Both doors are recent replacements, and the exact form of the western door is unknown.
The principal entrance is through the tower archway by way of a large, semi-circular arch that is decorated by rubbed brick and am impost three bricks high at the lower end of the arch. The arch itself consists of voussoirs with plastered over, white bricks forming the interior of the arch. Above the arch is a primitive, triangular tympanum the lower line of which extends beyond the raked borders. It is embellished by a fascia on the outer course with a fillet and ovolo on the inner course. It was alternately decorated with white cement, a marble tablet, and now a wash of mortar.Rawlings 34