Virginia Baptists early established relationships with Indians. John Leland, arguably the most prominent of the 18th-century Virginia Baptist itinerant preachers, wrote that in the 1780s he preached in the “royal pavilion” of an Indian chief, John Tohan. Leland said: “After preaching, I baptized two persons, and then heard the king preach, for he was priest as well as king. I ate a good dinner with the king, slept in his apartment and left the town in the morning.” Perhaps “King” Tohan himself was already a Baptist!
Fred Anderson
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Philip Montague of Middlesex began preaching in the first decade of the 1800s and was said to have been among the first ministers to preach to the Native Americans in Virginia. They brought the light of the world into the forest for Virginia woodland Indians and a Baptist presence has continued to the present.
Indians in King William and New Kent counties were members of early Baptist churches. Upper College (now Sharon) likely and Lower College (later Colosse) definitely had Indian members, including 15 charter members. In an 1855 issue of the Religious Herald C.F.H. Crockett of the American Indian Mission Association told of leading a service on one of the reservations in which John Langston, a Virginia Indian, participated. Crockett mentioned that although Indians were members of Colosse, they also held religious meetings on the reservation every Sunday under the leadership of John Langston. These likely were held outdoors in a grove of trees.
In 1865 Pamunkey Indian Baptist Church was constituted on the Pamunkey reservation. It began with members who requested letters of dismissal from Colosse. It was the first of what became six historically and predominately Indian churches affiliated with the large Dover Baptist Association. The six churches — Pamunkey (1865), Samaria (1901), Tsena Commocko (1922), Mattaponi (1932), Indian View (1942) and Rappahannock Indian (1964) — are located in territory on or near the reservations in King William County. Together the churches have memberships of over 1,000 and gather offerings totaling over a half-million dollars each year. Of course, these churches are open to all Christians.
Chief Kevin Brown (right) of the Pamunkeys visted the VBHS to research early documentation of Virginia Indians.
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The six churches are members of the Baptist General Association of Virginia. George Cook, a legendary chief, was a mainstay of the Pamunkey Church and he was the first Virginia Indian known to have been a delegate to a meeting of the General Association. In recent years, persons of Indian heritage have served on the Virginia Baptist Mission Board.
There was a time — and within memory — when segregation called for separate schools. Some Virginia Indians sent their children to Oklahoma for an education. In Virginia there were five public schools for Indians, but for a time they went only to the seventh grade. These small — separate but certainly not equal — one-room schoolhouses provided rudimentary education in rural Virginia.
Mrs. Fred Pfaus became a pamphleteer with a cause. She wrote tiny pamphlets about Dover’s Indian churches and the inadequate schools and found supporters to bring her writings into print. In 1949 she dared to write: “Every other nationality in the state of Virginia has the privilege of higher education — only the Indians are denied this, their just right. Can any fair-minded American feel that this treatment of the descendants of the original Virginians is just in this ‘land of the free and the home of the brave?’ ”
One of the teachers in the Indian schools of the ’40s was Lula Whitehead. At age 5, she lost her parents. In time, she prevailed to earn an education “so that she could help her people.” She attended Bacone College, the Indian school in Oklahoma, as well as William Jewell College, the Baptist school in Missouri. In 1942 she returned to Virginia to teach in one of the Indian schools.
Olive Bagby, a white Baptist woman of King and Queen County and a champion of missions, became enthused with what was known as the Essex County project. Children of mixed-race parentage — Native Indian, African American and Caucasian — were not permitted to attend white schools and refused to be sent to the all-black schools. For several years Virginia Woman’s Missionary Union paid a missionary’s salary while the Rappahannock WMU provided a school building and other expenses, and thereby an education was available for the mixed-race children. Olive Bagby was instrumental in support of the project.
Times changed and Virginia Indians became assimilated into the general culture and intermarried with persons of other races. Indians left reservation life and took the highways to Virginia’s colleges and work places and became prominent in the professions as well as the labor force. Yet tribal pulls and common heritage maintained a sub-culture and a fierce persistence to claim a rightful place in the diversity of modern times.
The struggle to secure federal recognition for the Virginia tribes has occupied the attention of tribal leaders in recent years. Earlier this year Kevin Brown, chief of the Pamunkeys, visited the Virginia Baptist Historical Society along with the genealogist of the tribe to examine early documents which helped to establish identity of the tribe. He would like for the Pamunkeys to also secure federal recognition.
Several years ago Richard Moore, former director of missions for the Dover Association, took this columnist for a visit to the two reservations. Moore cultivated good relationships with the Indian churches and enjoyed company with the Indians. He introduced me to several individuals as we visited homes, the fish hatchery, the Pamunkey Indian Museum, Gertrude Custalow’s own museum on the Mattaponi Reservation and the Pamunkey and Mattaponi Baptist churches. For this writer and historian, it was one of those wonderful days which forever lives in memory.
This summer I took a small group on a tour retracing the paths of my earlier tour with Richard Moore. It was the hottest day of the summer and armed with bottles of water, sun screen and hats, the group of young Virginia Baptists (alright, they were my grandchildren) visited the Pamunkey Reservation. We were shown the museum, the pottery workshop and the one-room schoolhouse which has been restored. Our guide pointed out exactly where she sat when she was a student. As we left, one of the young Virginia Baptists exclaimed, “I like this place!”
Note: The Pamunkey Indian Museum is located about 40 miles northeast of Richmond and is usually open every day but Monday. Telephone 804.843.4792 for details. The “Indian churches” welcome all visitors for Sunday services.
Fred Anderson is executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and the Center for Baptist Heritage and Studies, located on the campus of the University of Richmond. He may be contacted at [email protected] or at P.O. Box 34, University of Richmond, VA 23173.