Built in 1894 during the Reconstruction Era, Zion Poplars Baptist Church served more than just religious functions. As one of the oldest independent African American congregations in Gloucester County, Virginia, the church also served the economic and educational needs of its community. It was built in the gothic revival style with vernacular detailing, attributed to the handiwork of Mr. Frank Braxton, a former slave. The church gained its name from the historical origins of the church and congregation, because the first services were held under seven united poplar trees. Four of these trees still stand on church grounds today.
Famous quotes containing the words poplars, baptist and/or church:
“The poplars are felled, farewell to the shade
And the whispering sound of the cool colonnade,”
—William Cowper (1731–1800)
“You should approach Joyce’s Ulysses as the illiterate Baptist preacher approaches the Old Testament: with faith.”
—William Faulkner (1897–1962)
“A State, in idea, is the opposite of a Church. A State regards classes, and not individuals; and it estimates classes, not by internal merit, but external accidents, as property, birth, etc. But a church does the reverse of this, and disregards all external accidents, and looks at men as individual persons, allowing no gradations of ranks, but such as greater or less wisdom, learning, and holiness ought to confer. A Church is, therefore, in idea, the only pure democracy.”
—Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772–1834)