Virginia’s oldest Baptist congregation will celebrate its 250th anniversary on Sept. 22.

Mill Swamp Baptist Church, located 11 miles west of Smithfield near the Isle of Wight-Surry county line, dates to 1929, but its congregation has been meeting at the same site since colonial times.

A video the Isle of Wight County Museum produced in 2022 on the church’s history states the congregation began in 1714 when the Rev. Robert Norton sailed from England to establish what was then called Burleigh Baptist Church, named for the Burleigh plantation in the Burwells Bay Area of Isle of Wight County.

In 1729, four years after Norton’s death, the Rev. Paul Palmer, founder of the Free Will Baptist movement in North Carolina, wrote a letter about a “comely little church in the Isle of Wight County of about 30 or 40 members” under the leadership of an elder, Richard Jones, whom Palmer described as “a very sensible old gentleman whom I have great love for.”

By 1774, one year before the start of the Revolutionary War, many of Palmer’s followers had moved to North Carolina and those who remained with Burleigh disbanded the church and reorganized as Mill Swamp Baptist. By 1788, Mill Swamp’s records listed 215 free and 75 enslaved men and women as members.

According to Gordon Nelson, a lifelong member, the circa-1929 brick building is the fourth church erected on the same ground. It was built one year after a fire burned Mill Swamp and Central Hill Baptist on the same night.

The congregation is named for the nearby Mill Swamp creek, where congregants would hold baptisms prior to the installation of running water in the church. Nelson and Joe Ferguson, another congregant, said many historic baptist churches were built near and named for bodies of water for this reason, as full immersion rather than a sprinkling of water on the forehead is a central tenet of the Baptist denomination.

Nelson estimates that Mill Swamp’s Sunday services average 125 attendees. He’s seen Mill Swamp’s demographics change significantly in the 79 years he’s attended.

In the 1950s and ’60s “most of the people who came here were farmers,” Nelson said.

Now, the number of congregants who farm number at only two. Nelson attributes the shift to farming having become more industrialized throughout the latter half of the 20th century, which saw machines reduce the need for as many farm hands.

Some descendants of Mill Swamp’s founding families – among them the Hollomans, Gwaltneys, and Cofers – have remained members of the congregation. But Mill Swamp has also seen many new faces, some from outside Isle of Wight County, who came “looking for a church that preaches the Bible,” Nelson said.

In 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic forced churches to stop holding indoor services, Mill Swamp’s pastor, the Rev. Billy Gardner, would stand outside and preach from the church portico using a radio transmitter to congregants who would park their cars in the parking lot and tune their radios to hear his broadcast.

“COVID did not shut down the services,” Nelson said.

The church will hold two 250th anniversary services, one at 10 a.m. and the other at 11 a.m., on Sept. 22, followed by a lunch catered by Captain Bob’s. The meal is free but seating is limited to those who call ahead at 757-357-2575.