ST. JOHN’S AT CITY POINT

I arrived at St. John's in January of 2008 expecting to stay a matter of weeks. I had told Kathy as much the night before I drove the hour and fifteen minutes up Route 10 for the first time, past the peanut stands and the pine stands and the long flat stretches of Surry and Prince George counties, into a city I barely knew. The Reverend Canon Win Lewis had called it a supply position, a bridge assignment to carry the parish through to Easter while the Diocese of Southern Virginia figured out what came next. I was still raw from losing my position at Chanco, still uncertain whether I had any more ministry left in me, and I remember thinking that a few Sundays of filling a pulpit was about all I could manage. I did not know yet that City Point had a way of keeping people longer than they planned to stay. It had been doing that to settlers, soldiers, and sailors for three hundred years before I ever pointed my car toward it.

The bluff announces itself before the town does. Route 10 drops down out of the rolling Piedmont approach and the land opens, and suddenly there is a wide gray-brown confluence below you where the Appomattox River empties into the James, the water churning slightly at the meeting point the way two currents do when they refuse, for a moment, to blend. Anyone who has spent time on tidal rivers knows that particular turbulence, the visible seam where one body of water pushes against another. City Point sits directly above that seam, on a point of high ground the Appamattuck and other Algonquian-speaking peoples of the lower James had already recognized, centuries before English sails appeared, as a place worth holding. High ground at a river junction is defensible, it is dry when the spring floods come, and it commands a view in three directions. Those are not qualities that go out of fashion. Indigenous communities used the point for exactly the reasons the Union Army would use it in 1864 and the reasons a struggling young parish would use it in 1840: you can see what is coming, and what is coming can see you. For a fledgling congregation trying to stake its claim along the river, that visibility carried both practical and spiritual weight. Practically, it made the church an unmistakable physical landmark to river travelers, watermen, and incoming planters long before they stepped off the boat; spiritually, being raised high above the waterline offered an enduring outward sign of moral presence and sanctuary, reminding the village below that its daily commerce was conducted under the watchful eye of the sacred.

The Grant and the Grid

English settlement reached this stretch of the James astonishingly early, within a decade of the Jamestown landing. Captain Francis Eppes received a patent for land at the confluence in the 1630s, and the name Eppes would attach itself to this neighborhood for the next two hundred years, through the ironworks and the plantations and eventually through the family politics that would complicate the founding of the parish itself. The land patents that survive from the colonial period describe the point in the surveyor's flat, functional prose of the time: so many acres bounded by the river, by a creek, by a marked tree or a neighbor's line. They are not poetic documents. But laid against a modern map, they show something the poetry misses, which is how little the essential geography has moved. The river still runs where the seventeenth-century surveyor's chain found it. The high ground still rises where his compass noted it rose. Centuries of tobacco cultivation, Civil War earthworks, and twentieth-century industrial fill have reshaped the shoreline in places, but the bluff itself, the dry defensible table of land above the confluence, has demonstrated remarkable geological stability over nearly four centuries of human occupation.

Early navigation charts of the James, the kind ship captains and river pilots relied on well into the nineteenth century, mark City Point with notations about depth and current that have nothing to do with sentiment and everything to do with commerce. The James was Virginia's highway long before Virginia had roads worth the name, and a vessel moving tobacco, grain, or later coal and manufactured goods downriver toward Hampton Roads needed a reliable account of where the channel ran deep and where it ran shallow, where a ship could anchor safely to wait on tide or wind. City Point's location at the mouth of the Appomattox made it a natural point of transfer, a place where river traffic from the interior of Southside Virginia met the larger artery of the James. Planters in Prince George and Dinwiddie counties shipped their crops through City Point's wharves for generations before anyone thought to build a church there. The commerce came first, and parish life followed the water routes; St. John's rose not apart from that bustling traffic, but precisely because the river channels had already anchored the community there.

By the time the vestry of what would become St. John's began looking for a parcel of ground in the late 1830s, City Point was a modest but functioning river village, not a wilderness outpost. The 1840 conveyance deed for the original church parcel, preserved among the diocesan and county records, describes a lot within the surveyed village grid, a grid that had been laid out decades earlier to organize the warehouses, the tavern, and the handful of merchant houses clustered near the wharves. The church did not create the town. The town made room for the church, carving out a lot of modest size on ground that was, notably, some of the highest and driest in the village, a detail that would matter enormously twenty-four years later when the wounded of two armies needed somewhere dry to lie down.

A Parish Finds Its Ground

The decision to place the church on the bluff rather than closer to the working wharves was practical and it was also, whether the vestry framed it this way or not, a choice about what a sanctuary is supposed to do. A church at water level would have flooded. Set high on the bluff, it could see the river traffic coming and going and ring its bell across water that carried sound further than it carried on land. From that vantage, it offered the small community of merchants, planters, mariners, and eventually enslaved and free laborers who lived and worked at City Point a fixed point that did not move with the tide. Rivers are generous and they are also unreliable. They rise, they silt, they change their habits after a hard winter upriver. A bluff does not. The people who chose this lot in 1840 may not have used the language of sacred geography, but they understood, in the practical way that river people always understand such things, that permanence mattered, and that this particular piece of ground had already proven, across two centuries of use by Indigenous people, English planters, and village merchants, that it would still be there next spring.

The architecture that rose on that lot was unassuming by the standards of Virginia's grander parish churches. St. John's was built as a plain rectangular building of brick, without the Gothic ambitions that would characterize later nineteenth-century Episcopal construction, and it fit comfortably into the modest scale of the village around it. It did not dominate the City Point skyline the way a cathedral dominates a European town square. It took its place within the grid, a few streets back from the wharves, close enough to the merchant houses and the modest frame dwellings of pilots and watermen that a resident could walk to Sunday service without much trouble, and far enough from the water that the building would stay dry when the river ran high. That modesty is itself worth noting, because it tells us something about who City Point was in 1840: not a town of great planter fortunes building monuments to themselves, but a working river village, assembling a church the way it assembled everything else, out of practical necessity and whatever resources were on hand.

Bells, Whistles, and Tides

What the maps and deeds cannot fully capture is the texture of daily life that the geography produced, a texture built on three overlapping rhythms that governed the village for a hundred years and more. The tide was the oldest rhythm, indifferent to human schedules, rising and falling on its own lunar clock regardless of what the watermen or the merchants needed that day. A waterman learned the tide the way a farmer learns the seasons, as a fact of life rather than a preference, and the whole economy of the wharves, the loading and unloading, the arrival and departure of vessels, bent itself around that fact.

The church bell was the second rhythm, newer than the tide but no less structuring, calling the small Episcopal community to Sunday worship and, in time, marking funerals, weddings, and the ordinary passage of the week. A bell carries differently over water than over land, and residents of City Point would have heard St. John's bell from the wharves, from the decks of anchored vessels, from across the river mouth on a still morning, in a way that gave the parish a presence in daily life disproportionate to its small membership.

The third rhythm arrived later and arrived loudly: the steam whistle, first from the river traffic itself and then, by the early twentieth century, from the industrial plants that would transform City Point into Hopewell. Where the tide was eternal and the church bell was sacred, the whistle was commercial and insistent, calling shift workers rather than worshippers. The three sounds, tide, bell, and whistle, layered over one another across the decades, and residents of the village learned to parse them the way city dwellers today parse traffic patterns, instinctively, without conscious thought, until the sounds simply became the sound of home.

This layered rhythm created what sociologists of small communities sometimes call a tight social fabric, though the people living inside it would have had simpler words for it. Everyone at City Point, in the antebellum decades and for a long while afterward, lived within easy walking distance of everyone else. Plantation families, merchant families, free and enslaved laborers, river pilots, and eventually factory hands and clergy families, all occupied the same compressed geography above the same confluence of rivers. A parish of modest size, meeting in a modest brick building, served as one of the few institutions that pulled this mixed population together on a regular schedule, and the fact that the church sat on stable, elevated, visible ground meant it functioned as a landmark in the most literal sense: a mark on the land that oriented people, that told them where they were in relation to the river, the wharves, and each other.

Sanctuary from a Changing City

That orienting function did not disappear when City Point's quiet river village identity gave way, in the first decades of the twentieth century, to the sprawling industrial city of Hopewell. The DuPont Company's arrival before the First World War transformed the surrounding land almost overnight, bringing thousands of new workers, new streets, new housing thrown up at a pace that older residents found disorienting and sometimes alarming. Hopewell in those years became one of the fastest-growing towns in the United States, a boomtown built on guncotton and dynamite production, and the quiet grid that had organized City Point since the colonial era was suddenly surrounded by a much larger and much noisier municipality.

Through all of that change, the bluff itself did not move, and neither did the church sitting on it. Longtime residents and plant newcomers alike found in St. John's a shared anchor of stability midst the rapid expansion of Hopewell, discovering that the high ground and the modest brick sanctuary offered an enduring steadiness the noisy boomtown could not match. I have heard parishioners describe the churchyard, even now, as a place where the noise of modern Hopewell seems to fall away, where the traffic on Route 10 and the industrial hum from the plants along the river grow quiet enough that a visitor can hear the wind in the magnolia and the water moving below the bluff. That effect is not accidental. It is the direct inheritance of a site chosen, nearly two centuries ago, precisely because it stood above the flood line and above the noise of the working wharves.

Thin Ground

Celtic Christianity has a term for places like this, and I did not fully appreciate the term until I had spent several years walking the grounds of St. John's myself. A thin place, in that older tradition, is a location where the membrane between the ordinary world and the presence of God seems to wear down, where the boundary that usually feels solid becomes, for reasons no theologian has ever fully explained, transparent. The Celtic Christians who coined the phrase were thinking of specific islands and hilltops in Ireland and Scotland, places with their own long histories of pre-Christian sacred use absorbed into a Christian framework, not unlike the way an Algonquian point of high ground above a river confluence was later absorbed into an English colonial grid and then into an Episcopal parish boundary.

I do not think the thinness of a place depends on doctrine or denomination. I think it depends on time, on the accumulated weight of generations who have stood on the same ground believing that something larger than themselves was present there. City Point's bluff carries that weight in a way few parcels of ground in Virginia do, having been recognized as significant by Indigenous communities, by colonial surveyors, by merchant planters, by a struggling antebellum parish, by two armies in the deadliest war in American history, and by the thousands of industrial workers who later built their lives in its shadow. Each of those groups left something behind in the soil and in the brick, not literally in every case, though in the case of the churchyard quite literally indeed, but in the sense that their attention, their hope, and their grief soaked into the place and did not entirely leave.

I did not understand any of this intellectually on the January afternoon I first drove up Route 10 toward what I expected to be a few weeks of supply work. I understood it, if I understood it at all, only gradually, over the fall afternoons I came to spend wandering the churchyard after everyone else had gone home, reading names on stones worn soft by two centuries of river weather, feeling the particular quality of stillness that settles over that bluff once the sun drops behind the trees. The documentary record—the parchment deeds, vestry minutes, and convention journals that follow—maps the institutional survival of that ground through disestablishment, war, Reconstruction, and factory smoke. Yet every recorded debate and ledger entry ultimately points back outside to the river soil itself, where the quiet of the bluff has outlasted every upheaval, holding its place above the water just as it always has.