A rock of ages: Benn’s 100-year history preserved in cornerstone
Published 9:39 am Monday, July 29, 2024
A soldered copper box concealed for 100 years within Benn’s cornerstone contained, among other items, a 1924 edition of The Smithfield Times and a letter agreeing to pay $17,454 for the church construction. (Photos courtesy of Benn's UMC)
A circa 1924 rendering of Benn’s United Methodist Church
This undated pre-1924 photograph shows the circa-1888 Benn’s Church, known as the “church by the road” for its proximity to Red Point Road, a dirt road between Smithfield and Suffolk that later became the four-lane Benns Church Boulevard.
This is the only known photo of the 1924 Benn’s Church and its circa-1888 predecessor standing side by side.
The Rev. Ileana Rosario delivers a sermon commemorating the 100th anniversary of the circa-1924 Benn’s United Methodist Church.
Attendees of Benn’s 100th anniversary service gather outside the church for a group photo.
One hundred years ago on July 4, a mason laid the cornerstone at Benn’s United Methodist Church, concealing a copper box within it.
The box sat soldered shut and undisturbed for the next century until opened on July 7 of this year during a Sunday service celebrating the building’s centennial anniversary.
Inside was a 1924 letter from Benn’s leadership agreeing to a construction cost of $17,454 and a July 4 edition of The Smithfield Times from that year.
It’s the second-oldest known preserved printed edition of Smithfield’s 1920-founded newspaper, whose digital archives in the Virginia Chronicle, a database of newspapers maintained by the Library of Virginia, presently go back to 1928. The Isle of Wight County Museum has another printed edition dated March 23, 1923.
The box also contained written histories of Isle of Wight County and the Smithfield Union Lodge on South Mason Street, conference minutes, a deed for the land, lists of church trustees and contributors of the day, a buffalo nickel, 3-cent coin and a dime.
Benn’s was constructed in a gothic style with a steep roof and brick buttresses in homage to St. Luke’s Church, from which the Benn’s congregation traces its origins.
The county’s oral history dates St. Luke’s, now a museum, to 1632, though historians and archeologists, according to St. Luke’s website, now suggest construction of the 17th century church was completed between 1685 and 1687.
Methodism began as a movement within the Church of England, according to John Ericsson, education coordinator for St. Luke’s. John Wesley, considered the father of the movement, was an Anglican priest to his dying day.
Benn’s Church, whose members were once part of the Newport Parish of the Anglican Church, branched off from St. Luke’s in 1789, four years after protestants in the United States disestablished the Church of England and formed what is today known as the Episcopal Church.
Eliza Timberlake Davis, a Benn’s congregant who died in 1958, wrote a history of the church in 1934 to celebrate the 250th anniversary of American Methodism.
According to her writing, the early days of American Methodism saw ministers travel from Norfolk to Petersburg, preaching along the way.
Among them was Francis Asbury, who in 1784 had declared himself a bishop outside what is now known as the worldwide Anglican Communion. Asbury, prior to the construction of the first “meeting house,” would hold services in congregants’ homes, according to Timberlake.
““Frequently, Bishop Asbury would arrive unexpectedly and messengers would be sent out to announce such services, held at night in these houses … few in these days could read or write, for there were no schools, and have the opportunities for obtaining an education. From the lips of the preachers they learned both of religion and the news of the day,” she wrote.
George Benn, the namesake of Benn’s UMC, had owned the land in 1813 where Benn’s now stands, and deeded it that year to the growing Methodist congregation.
Two additional churches, one in 1838 and the other in 1888, were built on the same land as the original meeting house before the current brick building was erected.
According to Smithfield Times Publisher Emeritus John Edwards, a lifelong member of Benn’s, the 1924 church was designed to accommodate community activities. Smithfield’s Ruritan Club met in the church for many years.
One of Edwards’ earliest memories is of his mother cooking meals in the church basement. Benn’s was one of the few at the time to have a kitchen, Edwards said, and would use it to prepare meals for sale to raise money.
Legend has it that before the kitchen came the pay-to-play jousting tournament fundraisers. Until the Great Depression, young men would ride horses at gallop speed to try to skewer a ring on a post with a lance at the church’s Independence Day picnics.
The congregation and the church itself grew in the late 1960s with the addition of a two-story classroom wing for teaching Sunday School. It expanded again in the early 2000s with the addition of a family life center.
Edwards met his wife, Anne, as a child attending Sunday School with her. Both of their families have been Benn’s congregants for generations.
At that time, Benn’s — and Smithfield in general — was more rural.
“Farmers constituted well over half the congregation,” Edwards said.
Now, Isle of Wight County is the sixth or seventh fastest-growing county in Virginia, according to differing estimates by the U.S. Census Bureau and the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center. Benn’s now front’s Benns Church Boulevard, a four-lane highway. On the opposite side of the road from the church, the 50-bed Riverside Smithfield Hospital is under construction adjacent to the 776-home Benn’s Grant development.
The culture at Benn’s has changed too over the decades.
When Edwards was growing up, “you simply went to church,” he said. “You were expected to go to church. It was a culture. It was more than just a place people go to worship. They went to socialize, to be with their neighbors.”
