Bruton Parish Church

The walls are original. That matters more than it sounds.

Bruton Parish Church has stood on Duke of Gloucester Street since 1715 — not a reconstruction, not a careful replica, but the actual building, the one where Washington and Jefferson and Monroe sat in box pews while Virginia was still a colony and Williamsburg was its capital. When the General Assembly moved the government here from Jamestown in 1699, this church came with the deal. Public office required church attendance. The men who built the country worshipped here because they had to, and then because they wanted to.

The building itself is a cruciform design — the first of its kind in Virginia — drafted by Royal Governor Alexander Spotswood when the parish outgrew its earlier structure. Construction ran from 1711 to 1715. The parish had existed since 1674, formed from the consolidation of two earlier congregations, its name borrowed from a town in Somerset, England, ancestral home to several of the colony's leading families.

The churchyard holds colonial-era graves, and local tradition holds that it holds something else as well. The ghost tour operators will tell you the first wife of an early clergyman wanders the cemetery still, heartbroken and wailing — her husband reportedly brought his new wife to visit her grave. Whether you credit that or not, the churchyard is the kind of place that earns its legends.

The bell still rings. It has rung here for more than two and a half centuries. The parish is the most active in the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia — nearly two thousand members, four Sunday services. It survived the Revolution, the loss of state funding, the emptying of the capital.

The reason to go is the simplest one: the walls are real.