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Historic Polegreen Church Foundation Lecture Series -- 2005

Historic Polegreen Church Foundation brings a religious dissenter back from the past to relive Virginia’s turbulent colonial era.

HANOVER, VA: On Sunday, October 16, 2005 from 2:30-3:30 at Polegreen historic site on Rural Point Road in Hanover County, Robert Bluford, Jr., President of the Foundation, will portray colonial dissenter Samuel Morris, credited as being one of the first in the region to challenge the Established Church in the 1740s. The program is titled: A Conversation with Samuel Morris: the Man Behind the Minister.

Robert Bluford, Jr. portrays Samuel Morris, religious dissenter

A bricklayer by trade, Morris recognized, like many others, that the state-sponsored Church of England was not serving his spiritual needs. Unlike many others, he acted on his frustrations, traveling to Williamsburg to petition for a license to worship. It was Morris who took the lead in securing the services of Presbyterian minister Samuel Davies in 1747.

Visitors to the site will have an opportunity to gather under the award-winning memorial, meet this man and hear him reminisce about those difficult days when religious toleration, though the law, was hardly guaranteed and embraced by the colonial government. Visitors will be able to converse with this humble man who took it upon himself to challenge the age-old hold that the church-state relationship had on people.

Historic Polegreen Church Foundation is a non-profit organization, founded in 1990 to preserve the historic role played by Samuel Davies and the dissenting Presbyterian congregations he served in the evolution of our nation’s realization of religious freedom.

The Polegreen Church site is now marked by a steel skeleton that outlines the original dimensions of the meeting house. Confederate soldiers’ bombarded the church in 1864 to flush Union soldiers from its interior. It caught fire and burned to the ground. Archaeological research uncovered numerous examples of melted window panes, testament to the heat of the blaze. It was never rebuilt.