Victories in Victoria

The small Southside Virginia town of Victoria in Lunenburg County is “the place to be” on Sunday, Oct. 14, as the church celebrates its centennial. The events are the culmination of a year-long celebration. John V. Upton, executive director of the General Association, will be the guest speaker.

Over the last century, there have been generations who received their schooling in Victoria. Many of them mastered “the three R's” — reading, ‘riting and the road to Richmond or Raleigh, depending upon the direction in which they headed out of town. There have been others who put down deep roots in the town and never left. On Centennial Sunday, there will be a reunion of the natives.

The people who remained and newcomers along the way have maintained the beautiful brick church with its Doric colonnade. They have beautified and enlarged the house. They added an elevator for the convenience of the people. They have kept the stained-glass windows sparkling.

The windows are colorful jewels. One of them bears the symbols of two Sunday school classes, the Baraca and Philathea classes. There was a time when the two Bible classes for men and women, respectively, were found in most every Baptist church. At Victoria, the names are perpetuated in beautiful glass. One memorial window bears the words “Fudge Sale.” “Come-heres” and strangers need to be told that it does not refer to a fundraising project of yore but that it actually is a person's name.

There also are windows which bear the names of different railroad brotherhood societies which paid for them. These give clues to Victoria's storied past. The location was considered halfway between Norfolk and Roanoke and an ideal location for the space needed for a major player in the Virginia economy, the railroad. In 1906 large acreage of farm and forest lands was secured for maintenance shops for the railroad. The new town was christened Victoria and officially chartered in 1909. It was to be a railroading town. Land companies divided the acreage into parcels and soon houses and commercial buildings were built.

There was a policy among Virginia Baptists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to build a Baptist church wherever the railroad built a depot. There already was an existing Baptist church in the nearby countryside, but the residents of the new town wanted a Baptist church in Victoria. The first church business meeting was held on Oct. 13, 1907. At the meeting all of the standard documents were in place — articles of faith, covenant and constitution. The only thing the new church needed was a pastor. Just to organize a new Baptist church was victory in itself.

The church called William Bonnie Daughtry as the first pastor. At age 33, Daughtry already had four other churches. Somehow he managed to add Victoria as the fifth, with preaching twice a month. There were 25 members listed in the church's first report to the Concord Association. If the pastor could have gathered all of the five congregations into one meeting house, he would have had a sizeable congregation of some 400 worshippers. Instead, he had to travel to them across dirt roads that were dusty in the summer and muddy in the winter. His wife, Miss Della, also had to know all of the scattered families and remember in which direction her husband was headed to preach.

It was under Daughtry's pastoral leadership that the first Baptist church house was erected in the town. The church borrowed $600 to build a modest frame building. It had all the touches of a city church: arched Gothic-style windows and a small tower. Victory in the form of a house of worship had come to the Baptists of Victoria.

Charles Abbitt, a resident of the Chesapeake, the Virginia Baptist residential facility at Newport News, is among those oldtimers who treasures his Victoria roots. “My grandparents were charter members and my father came shortly after.” They worshipped in the original building. Abbitt recalls: “The railroad prospered except in the 1920s when a strike created a crisis. Some ‘strike-breakers' took the jobs from others. It was something which a little community like ours didn't get over for a long time. There were boys who wouldn't play with each other because some of their fathers were ‘strike-breakers.' ”

The Twenties also was the decade of advancement for the Victoria Church. It was proposed that a substantial brick building be erected. V.H. Harrell was pastor during the building program. The cost reflected the general prosperity of the early Twenties. It would cost $45,000; but at the time of occupancy, the new building still had a debt of $15,000. The stock market crash of '29 and the Great Depression which followed left the congregation saddled with the debt. The men of the church kept raising the money in modest amounts just to pay the interest on the debt. The women organized a Ladies' Aid Society to raise funds. Even little children gave their coins. Samuel G. Harwood was the pastor during the critical years and he reduced his own salary to help the church meet its expenses. Victory from debt did not come until 1942.

There were other victories. In 1923 when construction on the new church building was ready to commence, the original building was given to an African-American Baptist congregation, Pleasant Oak. The materials were used for a new meeting house for Pleasant Oak which was constructed about two miles out from town. In June 2007, as part of the centennial, Victoria Baptists gathered at their old building and shared a fellowship supper and joint worship service with the Pleasant Oak Baptists. Both churches' choirs and pastors, Stanley Hare of Victoria and James Green of Pleasant Oak, participated in the worship service. For Baptists of Southside Virginia, black and white, it was yet another victory.

Fred Anderson may be contacted at fred.anderson@ vbmb.org.