As the Encyclopedia of Virginia explains, “English settlers in Virginia introduced a parish system during the colony’s first few decades,” organizing the colony into smaller geographic territories known as parishes. A parish “in colonial Virginia was a unit of both civil and religious authority that covered a set geographical territory.” It contained a “central church and frequently two or more so-called chapels of ease in outlying areas.” (1)

From at least 1635 onward, the parish and clergy were overseen by a vestry of laymen (typically 12, serving lifetime appointments), whose responsibilities included executing the parish’s governmental functions. In 1641, for example, the General Assembly assigned vestries the responsibility for laying the leavy,(2) collecting substantial taxes that supported not only the parish priest and church facilities but also the parish’s poor, orphaned, elderly, and ill.(3) The vestries also oversaw the distribution of these funds, and thus the parish’s work as “the largest and most effective social welfare agency” in the colony at that time.(4) The Vestry Books thoroughly document this work in the Lynnhaven and Elizabeth City parishes.

The vestries were also responsible for:

• Administering the periodic counting of every tobacco plant in the parish, as required by an act of the assembly instituted “for the better & more Effectual Improving of the Staple of Tobacco”; and

• Quadrennially “Processioning the Boundaries,” as directed by the county court, to clarify or confirm the boundaries between landowners’ properties, and adjudicating boundary disputes within the parish. This duty was documented in the vestry books that are the focus of this exhibit, and examples of this work can be found in the George Wythe exhibit.

After the disestablishment of the Church of England in the former colonies in 1784 and the upheavals of the Revolution, the role of the church and vestry changed. The newly formed Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States replaced the Church of England, vestries dissolved and reconstituted, new oathswere taken to the Protestant Episcopal Church, and the vestries became less involved in social services as the separation of church and state was implemented.

1 Bond, Edward. "Parish in Colonial Virginia, The" Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Humanities, (07 Dec. 2020). Web. 25 Mar. 2026

2 The Vestry Books use several different spellings but “leavy” is used throughout the exhibit unless citing a direct quote with an alternate spelling.

3 Bond, Edward.

4 Bond, Edward.