I spent much of my spare time during 2024 researching the history of Benn’s Church, the United Methodist congregation located just south of Smithfield that’s been my church home since I was carried to Sunday services there in my mother’s arms many years ago.

It wasn’t the first time I had delved into the old church’s past. Benn’s has a storied history dating to the earliest years of Methodism in America and, in 1989, celebrated its 200th anniversary as a recognized Methodist congregation. That year, I was encouraged to write historic vignettes concerning the church’s history, and research leading to the writing of those sketches proved to be fascinating.

Then, and again during this past year, though, the work also proved to be frustrating because much of the church’s history is simply unknown. 

Preserving an organization’s history, whether it’s a church, a business or a family, requires work, and most of us are unwilling to do that work, and I include myself in that condemnation. Thus, histories are regularly lost because generations of us are not willing to take the time to record what we know, or save information we may possess.

Here are a couple of examples.

In the case of Benn’s, the church was blessed to have among its early 20th century members a lady by the name of Eliza Timberlake Davis. Mrs. Davis was a native of Warren County, but she lived in Isle of Wight much of her adult life. 

She was the wife of Charlie Davis, longtime Isle of Wight commissioner of the revenue, and an avid student of local history. She was among the corps of Smithfield women who managed to save the Courthouse of 1750 from destruction in the 1930s.

Mrs. Davis spent much of her time poring over ancient county records, making an easily retrieved record of court cases, wills and other information that formed much of the underlying historic data used by John Bennett Boddie when he wrote the 700-page “Seventeenth Century Isle of Wight County Virginia.”

She wrote several genealogical reference books, some of which are still in print, but of more interest here, she wrote, in 1934, a history of Benn’s Church. It’s quite brief, totaling seven pages of single-spaced type, and some of it is devoted to listing church officials during her years as a member of Benn’s. Nevertheless, it contains a priceless collection of early church information and is the most extensive history known to exist.

And yet, it was lost once and could have been a second time. When I was growing up in the 1950s, the church bulletins contained an abbreviated version of Mrs. Davis’ history, but when we celebrated the 1989 anniversary, we tried unsuccessfully to find the full history. Mrs. Davis had no children, but she and Mr. Davis had extended family here, and we contacted those we could locate. No one knew anything about the Benn’s history, which apparently was never printed for distribution.

Then, in 2003, a Virginia Beach resident whose father had been a pastor at Benn’s wrote to the current pastor, telling him that among her father’s files was a copy of Mrs. Davis’ History of Benn’s. She had it copied and sent it to the church in July 2003. There it was promptly filed and, once again, forgotten. 

We found it last year while going through some files at the church. It’s now preserved and available via the church’s website, where it can be downloaded in PDF form.

Mrs. Davis was also responsible for preserving what is probably the earliest written record of Benn’s, penned in 1855 by the Rev. John Bayley, another Benn’s pastor. That document had been placed in a scrapbook by Mr. Bayley or his family and was located in 1936 by a Newport News resident. She knew of Mrs. Davis and sent the document to her, and Mrs. Davis, in turn, prevailed upon Smithfield Times Publisher Jesse Scott to publish it. 

Today, that remarkable document can be found in the Virginia Chronicle files, but we also transcribed it so that it too is available via the Benn’s website.

What’s not available are the extensive notes, letters and other documents that Mrs. Davis is bound to have collected. We know they existed because she quoted from them in writing her church history. Apparently, the files were not saved following her death in 1958. It would certainly not have been the first — or last — time that a collection of historic information was tossed following someone’s death.

I offer these stories simply as examples of how fragile local history can be. I suspect there are Smithfield Times readers who may possess family, church or business records, stashed away in a trunk or cardboard box somewhere. I also suspect that there are those who have asked, What on earth should I do with these old letters and things? 

If you possess that kind of information, please don’t throw it out before you at least contact the Isle of Wight Museum to see what might be valuable to the future understanding of our county.

 

John Edwards is publisher emeritus of The Smithfield Times. His email address is j.branchedwards@gmail.com.