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The first structure on this site, built in 1733, was known as the “Falmouth Anglican Church.”  The site contained a “church and church yard” or cemetery.  From l755 to 1760, a second church was built.  It burned in 1818 and was rebuilt in 1819 utilizing portions of the same brick foundation. The current building was known to…

Mount Hope Baptist Church is a historic church located in Stafford, Virginia. It was established on October 16, 1880 by Reverend Natus Washington, and the first Sunday school was gathered in 1871. The church was originally worshipped at St. John School House near Brooke, and the Pickle Factory building nearer to the church later became…

The Bethlehem Primitive Baptist Church was organized in 1868, just three years after the end of the Civil War, by the Reverend York Johnson. Johnson, previously enslaved, and twenty-seven others separated from the White Oak Primitive Baptist Church. Originally it was called the Bethlehem Church of Colored Members. The Reverend Johnson, once enslaved with the…

Stafford’s best-known gold mines were: Eagle/Rappahannock Smithfield Rattlesnake/Horsepen Lee Monroe New Hope Smaller Stafford mines included: Brower Elliot Farm Fairview Franklin MacDonald Prospect Puss King Wise Farm

Ironically, the South’s most prominent abolitionist, Stafford’s Moncure Daniel Conway, came from a diverse and eclectic family of predominantly enslavers and independent thinkers: Uncle Peter Vivian Daniel (also featured image), was Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. He advocated the “peculiar institution” of slavery as benevolent to mankind. Peter Vivian Daniel Cousin and Richmond…

1832-1907 Moncure Daniel Conway was the son of Walker P. Conway (1805-1884) and lived at what is now 305 King Street (River Road) in Falmouth. He graduated from Dickinson College in 1849, studied law for a year, then became a Methodist minister. He graduated from Harvard in 1854 with a degree in divinity. After graduation,…

Stafford historian Homer Musselman identified 153 Staffordians, almost all in the 45th Virginia Militia Regiment, who served in the War of 1812. Subsequent research by Mike and Marty Lyman indicates that as many as 1,000 Staffordians participated in the War of 1812. The war left Stafford untouched except for British soldiers who burned down the…

James Hunter’s Iron Works, also known as Rappahannock Forge, was located east of Falmouth. It was Stafford’s major industrial enterprise and one of Virginia’s and America’s early major industrial plants. Hunter’s large complex ran from today’s Old Forge neighborhood, south to the Rappahannock River, and east underneath I-95, to the Carter’s Crossing Shopping Center. Hunter’s…

John Mercer of Stafford’s Marlborough Point owned a vast and renowned library which he used to educate both his nephew George Mason (IV) and his son John Francis Mercer. Both were delegates to the U. S. Constitutional Convention who refused to sign the final document because it lacked a declaration or bill of rights. Mercer,…

By Marion Brooks Robinson Until the late 1930s, this large fish, weighing between 60 and 75 pounds and measuring 5 to 6 feet long, was caught regularly in the waters just below the fall line in the Rappahannock River. My father had a trap, known as a “fall” trap, used mainly for catching herring, but…