Bruton Parish Church and the PRESIDENTS
JONATHAN L. STOLZ
established more than a century before the Declaration of Independence was signed, Bruton Parish Church in Williamsburg, Virginia, is uniquely connected to many who were integral to the United States’ founding. As George Carrington Mason wrote in 1945, “Bruton lay at the very heart of history-in-the-making, and its records are adorned by many of the greatest names of the American Revolution and colonial era that preceded it.”1 Among those who worshipped there were five future presidents and generations of related families who played a role in the country’s formative period. The storied history of Bruton’s genesis, links with presidents, and relationships with other notable individuals who prayed, visited, or were buried in its graveyard highlight how one of America’s oldest Episcopal churches in continuous use is entwined with the nation’s dawn and beyond.
in the New World in 1607. “They brought the English Church with them so naturally that they all assumed it to be established in Virginia as it was in England,” explains Arthur Pierce Middleton.2 The formality of inducting Anglicanism as the state religion occurred with legislation passed by the Virginia Assembly in 1624. The law created various parishes throughout the colony. Each parish, defined as “a geographic unit with boundaries that often coincided with, but never exceeded, those of the county,”3 was to have a government-sanctioned Anglican church that presided over the area. The statute dictated the specifications for governance, which went beyond the expected ecclesiastical duties for the parish’s rector and oversight of the vestry to include responsibility for various civil functions such as education and welfare for the poor within the community.
By 1632 the population had expanded from the original encampment in Jamestown to an area called Middle Plantation. “It was the first major inland settlement of Virginia . . . on a ridge lying between the James and York rivers about a
activities in this locality over its first two decades, a church history reports that “in 1658, Middle Plantation and [neighboring] Harrop parish were combined by an act of the Assembly to form a new geographical parish called Middletown.”5 Two years later, a wooden Anglican chapel was completed in Middletown Parish.
In 1674, Middletown and York County’s Marston Parish were consolidated to form a larger parish named Bruton. The appellation stemmed from Bruton, County Somerset, England, the ancestral home of the royal governor, Sir William Berkeley, and the secretary of the Virginia colony, Thomas Ludwell. 6 Bruton Parish Church’s first rector, Rowland Jones, had been born in England in 1644, attended Oxford, and was a pastor at a small English church before immigrating to Virginia. He faithfully served Bruton Parish Church from 1674 to his death in 1688. His tomb, and that of his son, Orlando, and Orlando’s wife, Martha, are located in today’s Bruton Parish’s chancel, in front of the altar.7
Because the two original churches in the former Middletown and Marston Parishes needed
Established in 1674 in Williamsburg Virginia, Bruton Parish Church is seen as it appeared in 2024, on its 350th anniversary. The current brick building was completed in 1715. opposite
A view of the altar within the sanctuary of Bruton Parish Church, 2024.
significant restorations, Bruton Parish’s vestry “ordered that neither should be repaired, but that a new church be built with brick.”8 At its dedication in January 1684, those who attended “could justly boast of a building that had few rivals in the colony in terms of its size and ornamental magnificence,” says Lounsbury.9
In 1699, the seat of government moved from Jamestown to Middle Plantation, which was renamed Williamsburg. Thus the brick church became the “court” church of colonial Virginia. William Archer Rutherfoord Goodwin, the man who inspired the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, reflected, “From this time there grew about the church an environment of ever-increasing interest, and about it gathered an atmosphere which the passing years has caught and reflects the light of other days.”10
The capital’s relocation greatly affected both Williamsburg and Bruton Parish Church. As the population grew,
there was a parallel increase in those who attended church services, particularly when the colony’s legislative body, the House of Burgesses, and the General Court were in session. “During the colonial period, those in public office were required to attend church,” explains Diana L. Bailey.11 When the College of William and Mary, which originally started as a seminary, assembled, the students and faculty also filled the pews. The swell of worshippers soon swamped the 1684 structure, and the vestry made plans to construct a larger building.
Bruton Parish’s new cruciform church opened its doors in December 1715. In the course of the eighteenth century many who prayed there led the break from England. Among the worshippers were five men who later became president of the United States: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, James Monroe, and John Tyler.
GEORGE AND MARTHA WASHINGTON
First Lady Martha Washington had two important connections to Bruton Parish Church. She was the great-granddaughter of its first rector, Reverend Rowland Jones. Jones’s son, Orlando, had a daughter named Frances Jones Dandridge, who was the mother of Martha. 12 Martha Dandridge had a second ancestral association with Bruton Parish Church through her first husband. In 1750, at age 18, she married 38-year-old Daniel Parke Custis, who also traced his roots to the founding of Bruton in 1674. His forebear, Daniel Parke, was a church warden alongside Reverend Rowland Jones, Martha’s great-grandfather.13
Daniel Parke Custis’s father, John Custis IV, lived in Williamsburg. He was a member of the House of Burgesses, the Governor’s Council, and the Bruton Parish vestry. Daniel’s early life was plagued by his overbearing father, who “squelched at least two of his courtships,”
according to Lynne Johnson Boller.14 After his initial resistance to his son’s marriage to Martha, she charmed him into giving his approval to the match. Their nuptials occurred shortly after John Custis IV died, and Daniel’s inheritance made him one of the wealthiest men in Virginia.
While the young couple lived in New Kent County, their connections to the Custis family in Williamsburg meant they visited often, especially for social events.15 They likely stayed at the Custis home on Francis Street during these visits. Daniel’s father described the house as being “strong and as high as any in the Government.”16 It was located close to Bruton Parish Church, so the pair, both of whom had a firm faith, likely attended services there, although no records substantiate this.
Martha and Daniel had four children in their seven years of marriage. “It was perhaps in her role as a mother that Martha Custis found the most joy as well as the most sorrow,” observes a writer for George Washington’s Mount Vernon website.17 Only her two youngest, John Parke Custis (known as “Jacky”) and Martha Parke Custis (dubbed “Patsy”) survived into adulthood. Her first two children—Daniel Parke Custis II and Frances Parke Custis II—died before age five. Then Martha’s husband Daniel passed away in 1757, a year after Patsy’s birth. The tombs of Daniel Parke Custis, his two deceased young children with Martha, and Daniel’s mother, Frances Parke Custis (wife of John Custis IV) are today in the Bruton Parish Church graveyard after being reinterred in 1895 from the Custis burial ground.18
Martha remained a widow for only a year and a half. On January 6, 1759, she married Colonel George Washington at her home in New Kent, and then the couple spent three months at Custis Square in Williamsburg. 19 Martha brought to their marriage a very large estate and two small children. The
future president embraced the youngsters as his own and became the guardian to them and to Martha’s future grandchildren.
These months in Williamsburg were one of at least fifty-five sojourns Washington made to Virginia’s colonial capital between 1752 and 1774.20 With a strong spiritual heritage of churchmen including a great-great-grandfather who was a minister in the Church of England,21 Washington likely attended Bruton Parish Church during those many stays. While there is testimony to his attendance at many churches later in life, only one direct personal reference for participating at a Bruton service exists. It occurred on June 1, 1774.
In May 1774, Washington was in Williamsburg as a member of the House of Burgesses. Shortly after the members assembled, information arrived that, by an act of Parliament, the port of Boston would be closed on June 1. On May 24, the Burgesses reacted by passing an order that the first day of June should be set apart as a “day of fasting, humiliation and prayer.”22 A brief entry in Washington’s diary at that time said: “‘June 1st, Wednesday,— went to church, and fasted all day,’ thus conforming not only to the spirit, but to the strict letter of the order,” explains historian William J. Johnson.23 opposite
An eternal flame embellishes the tomb of Daniel Parke Custis (1711–1757), the first husband of the future first lady, Martha Dandridge Custis Washington. To the right is Daniel’s mother, Frances Parke Custis, who died in 1715 at age 29. The tomb of two of his children with Martha, Daniel (1751–1754) and Frances (1753–1757), is at center.
The ledger stone from the tomb of Rowland Jones, the great grandfather of First Lady Martha Washington and the first rector of Bruton Parish Church, was moved inside the church from the graveyard in 1905 to protect it from further damage from the weather. Although much of the more than three-hundred-year old Latin epitaph has worn away, the translation of the surviving text concludes, “He performed his pastoral duty for fourteen years faithfully . . . for the Parish . . . a great loss. He died on April 23 at age 48 in the year of our Lord 1688.”
right
The ledger stone of planter Orlando Jones, the son of Rowland Jones, was also moved inside the church from the graveyard in 1905. His daughter, Frances Jones Dandridge, was the mother of the first first lady, Martha Dandridge Custis Washington. The epitaph begins, “Here lies in hope of a Blessed Resurrection the Body of M. Orlando Jones.”
THOMAS AND MARTHA JEFFERSON
Unlike Washington, who was said to be “reluctant to reveal his religious convictions” publicly,24 Thomas Jefferson was “among the most eloquent and forceful of the Founders on the fraught subject of religion,” says historian Jon Meacham.25 While Jefferson disagreed with some of the fundamental theological tenets of the Church of England in which he was raised, he regularly attended services and participated in responses and prayers in many different places of worship,26 including Bruton Parish Church. In 1760, at age 17, Jefferson enrolled at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg.27 The school had a very close connection with Bruton Parish Church prior to the American Revolution. During this era, all but one of Bruton’s rectors also served as president of William and Mary. It is no surprise that Jefferson and his fellow classmates were compelled to take part in a Sunday service at Bruton. Goodwin explained, “The students of the College, accompanied by one of the Masters, attended Bruton Parish Church, where the gallery in the west end was assigned to them, into which, by order of the Vestry, they were securely locked, and there they carved their names, which may be
seen today, and doubtless dreamed of religious liberty.”28
After finishing his courses at William and Mary, Jefferson stayed in the capital to study law under George Wythe. He was admitted to the Virginia bar in 1767 and began his career as young country lawyer. Subsequently, in the 1770s, he was in Williamsburg as a member of the House of Burgesses, 29 and, as members were obligated to attend church, he would have worshipped at Bruton. During this time Jefferson courted a young 22-year-old widow and heiress, Martha Wayles Skelton. Following the death of her first husband, she was living at her childhood home near Williamsburg. They were married on New Year’s Day 1772.
In their first years of marriage, Martha may have traveled with Jefferson to Williamsburg when the House of Burgesses was in session and attended Bruton with him, although there is no known documentation to prove it. Later, when Jefferson was governor, she briefly left Monticello and joined him in Richmond as Virginia’s first lady after the capital was moved there from Williamsburg in 1780.30 Through much of Martha’s ten-year marriage to
below
A view of the balcony where future President Thomas Jefferson frequently sat with his classmates at the College of William and Mary.
above
A marble memorial to Reverend William Holland Wilmer (1784–1827) is displayed on the wall of Bruton Parish Church. Before coming to Williamsburg to serve as the twelfth rector of Bruton Parish Church and the president of the College of William and Mary, Wilmer was the first rector of St. John’s Episcopal Church on Lafayette Square during the presidency of James Monroe.
Jefferson, “she was either pregnant, nursing, grieving the death of an infant or sick herself from the complications of childbirth,” writes John Hamilton Works Jr.31 She had six children, but four died in infancy. When Martha died on September 6, 1782, Jefferson suffered a deep depression.
JAMES MADISON
James Madison’s presence at Bruton Parish Church was rare compared with Thomas Jefferson’s, in large part because Madison matriculated at the College of New Jersey (now Princeton)32 rather than the College of William and Mary. He studied there due to his father’s concerns “that the tidewater of Virginia was unhealthy,” say scholars at Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello, “and because of disagreements with the Anglican establishment that controlled the Virginia college.”33
In 1776, 25-year-old Madison traveled to
Williamsburg for the first time as a newly elected member of House of Burgesses. There, his introduction to Thomas Jefferson sparked a lifelong friendship. Madison likely joined Jefferson and the other delegates in the established protocol of worshiping at Bruton during the lawmaking sessions. This may have been an unusual occurrence for Madison according to one historian, who noted, “he was not conscientious about attending church services while away from home.”34
After the Revolution, Madison tied himself to the Episcopal Church, the successor to the Church of England in America. He was married to Dolley Payne Todd by an Episcopal priest and regularly participated in Episcopal services when president. The Episcopalian liturgy was used at his funeral. Yet Madison kept his religious beliefs private. According to Darrin Grinder and Steve Shaw, he never made a public profession of faith or “identified himself as Episcopalian . . . or became a full communicant in the church.”35
JAMES MONROE
Bruton Parish Church and the Episcopal denomination were important to James Monroe throughout his life. At age 16 he enrolled in the College of William and Mary where he “was required to attend not only daily morning and evening prayer in the College chapel in what is today the Sir Christopher Wren Building,” writes historian David L. Holmes, “but also Sunday worship at neighboring Bruton Parish Church.”36 While he was an active participant in the Episcopal Church during his seventy-three years, “Monroe was silent about his personal religious beliefs, at least in the extant records,” says Holmes.37 Holmes suggests that Monroe was a cradle Episcopalian with “deistic tendencies who valued civic virtues over religious doctrine.”38
When he was president, Monroe regularly attended St. John’s Episcopal Church located just north of Lafayette Square in clear view of the White House. Today it is known as “The Church of the Presidents.” The first rector, Reverend William Holland Wilmer, had an affiliation with Bruton Parish Church. In 1826, Wilmer accepted the presidency of the College of William and Mary and the twelfth rectorship of Bruton Parish.39 He died the following year. His marble ledger tombstone is located in Bruton’s chancel.40
opposite
Top: A view from above the Bruton Parish Church transept captures the Rector’s Pew (far right) and Governor’s Pew (top center).
Bottom left: The baptismal font, located within the Governor’s Pew, is tentatively dated to 1675–1700. George Washington stood before this stone font as a godfather on fourteen occasions.
Bottom right: From 1698 to 1775, as detailed on the marble wall plaque, the throne-like chair within the Governor’s Pew was used by seventeen of Virginia’s colonial governors prior to the declaration of America’s independence. The Governor’s Palace, just two blocks north of Bruton Parish Church, was the official residence of the royal governors from 1722 until 1775.
Early U.S. presidents who regularly worshipped at Bruton Parish Church are remembered today by pew doors bearing their names. Also remembered are the first first lady, Martha Dandridge Custis Washington, her father-in-law John Custis, and her first husband Daniel Parke Custis.
right
JOHN TYLER
In 1790, John Tyler, who would be the tenth U.S. president, was born into a prominent Episcopalian family whose English lineage can be traced to sixteenth-century Williamsburg. An early ancestor, Henry Tyler Sr., was the original grantee of the land where the Governor’s Palace would be built.41 Henry and his son were both members of Bruton Parish Church’s vestry.
At age 12, Tyler entered the preparatory department of the College of William and Mary, where his father had graduated and roomed with Thomas Jefferson. As a student, young John Tyler regularly attended services at Bruton, but on one occasion, not to pray. In 1807, during college exercises held at the church, Tyler delivered his graduation address on the topic “Female Education.” Years later his son, Lyon G. Tyler, related the story about his father’s oration. It was given under the direction of William and Mary’s president, Bishop James Madison, the U.S. president’s cousin. Prior to the presentation, Madison reviewed Tyler’s draft and objected to several high-strung sentences. He told his student that he would be standing at the back of the church and would signal with his hands and cane when offensive passages should be omitted. Much to Madison’s chagrin and annoyance, Tyler ignored the gesticulations and continued his remarks without any alterations. Madison was furious with Tyler’s recalcitrance, but when the audience gave Tyler an ovation, Madison conveniently forgot his prior qualms and called it the finest student speech ever delivered within his recollection.42
Tyler married twice and fathered fifteen children. His first wife, Letitia Christian Tyler, was the first first lady to die while her husband was in office. Between that time, September 1842, and Tyler’s marriage to Julia Gardiner in June 1844, his daughter-in-law Priscilla Cooper Tyler and daughter Letitia (“Letty”) Tyler Semple were hostesses at the White House. Letty Semple died in poverty in 1907, evidently “blind, infirm but mentally virile,”43 in the Louise Home, a philanthropic institution just a few blocks from the White House. A noble obelisk marks her tomb in Bruton Parish Church’s graveyard.
opposite and right
The east and west faces of the Semple family monument in the Bruton Churchyard honor Letitia Tyler Semple (1821–1907) (right), who once served as White House hostess to her father, President John Tyler, and Mammy Sarah (opposite), a “devoted servant” to the family of President Tyler. The north and south faces (not pictured) contain epitaphs honoring Letitia Semple’s husband James and her husband’s parents.
left
Grave 83 in the Bruton Parish Churchyard holds the remains of two prominent one-time residents of the President’s Neighborhood in Washington, D.C.,—Truxtun Beale (1856–1936) and his wife Marie Beale (1880–1956). The Beales owned the Stephen Decatur House on Lafayette Square. The landmark residence was donated to the National Trust for Historic Preservation upon Mrs. Beale’s death and now houses the White House Historical Association’s David M. Rubenstein Center for White House History. The Bruton Parish Church organ was installed in memory of Truxtun Beale in 1939.
opposite Within a stone outline of the original brick Bruton Parish Church are the early eighteenthcentury tombs of the Bray family. Although the churchyard is filled to capacity today, two cineraria continue to allow space for the ashes of parishioners.
left
The “Angel of Peace,” a bronze lectern, was given to Bruton Parish Church in 1907 by President Theodore Roosevelt to commemorate “the three-hundredth anniversary of the permanent establishment of English Civilization in America.” In 1910, Roosevelt’s successor, William Howard Taft, made a short address to the congregation from the lectern.
below
A tablet placed in the south transept by John D. Rockefeller Jr. remembers Reverend William A.R. Goodwin as a “Minister • Teacher • Man of Vision in whose Heart and Mind was conceived the Thought of restoring the Beauty of this Ancient City and was himself the Inspiration of its Fulfillment.” A few steps away, among signs asking for quiet and designating the site as historic, is a bust of Goodwin sculpted from life in 1942.
TWENTIETH-CENTURY PRESIDENTS VISIT BRUTON
After Bruton Parish lost its luster as the “court” church, it became a small-town chapel. From 1840 to 1910, no presidents entered to tour or worship. The building was in disrepair, and a mid-nineteenth-century reshuffling of the interior erased its colonial ambience. But at the start of the twentieth century the old parish church and Williamsburg underwent restoration led by Bruton’s visionary rector, William A. R. Goodwin. Soon after, presidents once again came to the historic church to recognize its link with their founding predecessors and its place in the nation’s birth.
While Theodore Roosevelt did not personally visit Bruton, his presence is felt to this day. In 1907, in commemoration of the tercentenary of Jamestown, Roosevelt gave an “Angel of Peace” lectern to Bruton.44 It supported a bible that Britain’s King Edward bestowed to the church for the celebration. The bronze podium has been in continual use since then.
On November 22, 1910, William Howard Taft became the first sitting president to tour Bruton. It was a short, unexpected stop on his route by train from Fort Monroe to Richmond. According to the Virginia Gazette, he “came expressly to see the historic church to which his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, presented a lectern, from which Taft made a short address to the assembled people.”45
On Sunday, May 14, 1916, Woodrow Wilson briefly stopped in Williamsburg during a cruise up the James River. Before going to the College of William and Mary, Wilson spent thirty minutes surveying Bruton Parish Church.46
On Sunday, July 5, 1936, President and Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt attended a service at Bruton. They had traveled to Jamestown on the presidential yacht Potomac and then by car, the New York Times reported, “on a schedule arranged so that they arrived at Bruton Parish Church after all members of the congregations had been seated in their pews.”47 Reverend Goodwin delivered the sermon.
On Friday, March 8, 1946, future president General Dwight D. Eisenhower was escorting
left
After attending a service at Bruton Parish Church, President Franklin D. Roosevelt pauses at the gate with his aide Captain Wilson Brown and Reverend William A.R. Goodwin, 1936.
below
Photographers surround the horse-drawn landau carrying General Dwight D. Eisenhower and his guest Winston Churchill up Duke of Gloucester Street, 1946.
opposite
Reporters and children gather at the Bruton Parish Church gate for a glimpse of President and Mrs. Lyndon Johnson as they exit following a Sunday service. Although angered when Reverend Cotesworth Pinckney Lewis digressed from his sermon to express his opinions on the Vietnam War, the president shakes the reverend’s hand as daughter Lynda Johnson looks on, 1967.
Winston Churchill around restored Colonial Williamsburg in a landau. They narrowly escaped injury when flashbulbs “frightened [the] horses harnessed to an ancient open coach in which they were seated” and the horses “bucked and plunged and threatened to run away,” reported the New York Times. Unhurt and out of the carriage, they retreated to nearby Bruton Parish Church for a few minutes of sanctuary. “As the organ played softly, Mr. Churchill roamed through the church,” wrote the Times, before the party continued the tour, this time in a car.48
Lyndon B. Johnson had an uncomfortable encounter when he and Lady Bird Johnson attended Bruton on Sunday, November 12, 1967. As they sat in the front pew, reported the New York Times, Reverend Cotesworth Pinckney Lewis “interrupted his sermon on world problems to raise the issue of Vietnam.”49 The president was not pleased. Later, the church’s vestry apologized to the president for the rector’s discourtesy.
On May 29, 1983, Reverend Lewis was once again in the pulpit addressing another
opposite
A view through the Bruton Parish windows from the churchyard to Duke of Gloucester Street.
president sitting in the front pew. Unlike in 1967, he preached a “quiet sermon for world peace” to President Ronald Reagan and foreign leaders in Williamsburg for an economic summit.50 Few American churches outside Washington, D.C., and the nation’s early capital in Philadelphia have had as many connections with Founding Fathers and presidents as Bruton Parish Church. Nearly one-quarter of all presidents have entered Williamsburg’s historic House of God. In 1906, the Episcopal bishop of Southern Virginia spoke of Bruton as “the noblest monument of religion in America,” “a link among the days to knit the generations each to each.”51
notes
1. George Carrington Mason, “Historic Parishes of America: Bruton Parish,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 14, no. 4 (1945): 276.
2. Arthur Pierce Middleton, “The Colonial Virginia Parish,” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 40, no. 4 (1971): 431.
3. Dell Upton, “Anglican Parish Churches in Eighteenth-Century Virginia,” Perspectives in Vernacular Architecture 2 (1986): 90–91.
4. Carl R. Lounsbury, Bruton Parish Church: An Architectural History (Williamsburg: privately printed by Bruton Parish Church, 2011), 1–2.
5. Parke S. Rouse Jr., Bruton Parish Church: A Concise History (Williamsburg: privately printed by Bruton Parish Church, 1967), 4.
6. Mason, “Historic Parishes of America,” 4.
7. Lianne Johnson Boller, The Tombs and Memorials of Bruton Parish Church (Williamsburg: privately printed by Bruton Parish Church, 2023), 71, 79.
8. Rouse, Bruton Parish Church, 5.
9. Lounsbury, Bruton Parish Church, 9.
10. William A. R. Goodwin, Bruton Parish Church Restored and Its Historic Environment (Petersburg, Va.: Franklin Press, 1907), 45.
11. Diana L. Bailey, The Bruton Parish Story (Brookfield, Mo.: Donning Company, 2020), 13.
12. Wilson Miles Cary, “The Dandridges of Virginia,” William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine 5, no. 1 (1896): 33.
13. Amanda Walli, “Custis Family,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon website, www.mountvernon.org.
14. Boller, Tombs and Memorials, 92.
15. “Martha Washington,” Colonial Williamsburg website, www. colonialwilliamsburg.org.
16. Quoted in Jo Zuppan, “John Custis of Williamsburg, 1678–1749,” Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 90, no. 2 (1982): 190.
17. “Martha Washington: First Marriage and Children,” George Washington’s Mount Vernon website.
18. Boller, Tombs and Memorials, 132–33.
19. “Martha Washington,” Colonial Williamsburg website.
20. Wilford Kale, “George Washington Once Was a Frequent Visitor to Williamsburg,” Virginia Gazette, February 22, 2023.
21. William J. Johnson, George Washington the Christian (New York: Abingdon Press, 1919), 16.
22. Ibid., 62.
23. Ibid.
24. Gary Scott Smith, “The Faith of George Washington,” in Religion and the American Presidency, ed. Mark J. Rozell and Gleaves Whitney (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 16.
25. Jon Meacham, American Gospel: God, the Founding Fathers, and the Making of a Nation (New York: Random House, 2007), 3.
26. “The Founders’ Faith: Thomas Jefferson,” Lehrman Institute website, www.lehrmaninstitute.org.
27. Peter Onuf, “Thomas Jefferson: Life Before the Presidency,” University of Virginia Miller Center website, www.millercenter. org.
28. Goodwin, Bruton Parish Church Restored, 16.
29. Nancy Verell, “Thomas Jefferson in Williamsburg,” Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello website, www.monticello.org.
30. For a biography, see “Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson,” Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello website.
31. John Hamilton Works Jr., “Martha Wayles Jefferson,” Thomas Jefferson Heritage Society website, www.tjheritage.org.
32. Darrin Grinder and Steve Shaw, The Presidents and Their Faith (Boise, Idaho: Elevate Publishing, 2016), 32.
33. John Ragosta et al., “James Madison,” Thomas Jefferson’s Monticello website.
34. Vincent Philip Munoz, “Religion in the Life, Thought and Presidency of James Madison,” in Religion and the American Presidency, ed. Rozell and Whitney, 52.
35. Grinder and Shaw, Presidents and Their Faith, 33.
36. David L. Holmes, “The Religion of James Monroe,” Virginia Quarterly Review 79, no. 4 (Autumn 2003): 595.
37. Ibid., 601.
38. Ibid., 606.
39. Oran E. Warder, Rebuilding Zion: William Holland Wilmer and the Rebirth of the Episcopal Church in Virginia, 1782–1827 (Alexandria, Va.: VTS Press, 2023), viii.
40. Boller, Tombs and Memorials, 80.
41. A. Lawrence Kocher, “Architectural Report: Palace of the Governors of Virginia, Block 20, Building 3, 1952,” Colonial Williamsburg Foundation Library Research Report Series, 0133 (1990), 3–4.
42. Lyon G. Tyler, “Bruton Parish,” William and Mary College Quarterly Historical Magazine 15, no. 3 (1895): 178.
43. Waldon Fawcett, “Forgotten Mistresses of the White House,” Criterion, clipping in “Letitia Tyler: From a Portrait Painted at the White House,” New York Public Library Digital Collection, www.digitalcollections.nypl.org.
44. “Roosevelt’s Gift Accepted,” New York Times, July 7, 1907, 7.
45. “President W. H. Taft Pays Us a Short Visit,” Virginia Gazette, November 24, 1910, 1.
46. Wilford Kale, From Student to Warrior: A Military History of the College of William and Mary (Williamsburg: Botetourt Press, 2017), 197.
47. Charles W. Hurd, “Roosevelt Visits Historic Church,” New York Times, July 6, 1936, 3.
48. “Churchill Escapes in Coach Accident,” New York Times, March 9, 1946, 3.
49. Robert B. Semple Jr., “With Johnson in the Front Pew, Minister Questions War Policy,” New York Times, November 13, 1967, 1, 3.
50. Helen Thomas, “Leaders Pray for Peace in 268-Year-Old Church,” May 30, 1983, UPI Archives website, www.upi.com.
51. Quoted in Goodwin, Bruton Parish Church Restored, 51.
