The Anglican Church in Orange County— Its Beginnings

John Nelson

St. Matthew's Parish in Hillsborough traces its origins to the 1752 act of the North Carolina General Assembly that formed a new county — named “Orange” — out of portions of Granville, Johnston, and Bladen counties. Orange County (and St. Matthew's Parish whose boundaries matched the county's) was initially far more extensive than today's Orange. With widely dispersed rural settlements, North Carolina created large counties and parishes in order to include a population sufficient to support local governmental and religious institutions.

Organizing local government proved easier than establishing a parish in Orange County. Quakers, Presbyterians, Lutherans, German Reformed, and others with no religious affiliation predominated among the settlers of North Carolina's Piedmont region. Separate Baptist and later Methodist evangelists further complicated this religious pluralism and ethnic diversity, making the effort to launch an Anglican parish a formidable challenge. Moreover, these settlers associated Anglicanism with the eastern political elite, not just royal officials, but the gentry planters and merchants who controlled the Assembly and whose policies and actions were increasingly viewed in Orange and neighboring counties as corrupt, tyrannical, and unjust. Resistance in the form of the Regulator movement eventually moved beyond petition, political contests, and boycott to violence.

Orange County in the 1750s and 1760s offered anything but a promising site for planting an Anglican parish. Nonetheless, a start was made. The 1752 measure provided authorization and direction, but to translate intention into action required the identification and gathering of persons willing to join together to elect a vestry, contribute to the construction of a church or chapel, and to secure the services of a minister. The fledgling congregation secured land in 1759 and set about to build the chapel known as St. Mary's, a tangible sign of commitment that helped to secure a minister. For the latter and all-important step, the
Orange County Anglicans had no bishop, seminary, or diocesan structure to which they could turn but, fortunately, there was a vital source of assistance, the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts (S.P.G.). Chartered by William III in 1701, the S.P.G. tapped the energy and funds of zealous clergy and laity in the British Isles to foster the expansion overseas of the Church of England by recruiting clergy as missionaries and providing them with annual stipends. By this means, St. Matthew's Parish obtained its first minister, George Micklejohn in 1766 or 1767.

For more of all this and the opportunity to place St. Matthew's experience in the broader context of colonial Anglicanism (including reflections on the bizarre circumstance of no bishop in residence in colonial British America), come to St. Mary's Chapel west of Hillsborough on Saturday, September 20, at 10:00 a.m. Hope to see you all there.

St. Matthew's Episcopal Church
www.stmatthewshillsborough.org