Northern Neck Now

One of the architectural highlights of the village of Heathsville (the Northumberland County seat) is St. Stephen’s Church, an unusually pure example of the wooden Carpenter Gothic style popular throughout America in the mid-19th-century. Parish records list the designer as T. Buckler Ghequiere, a Baltimore architect who probably drew ideas from illustrations in Richard Upjohn’s Rural Architecture (1852). Many of the building’s fittings were shipped to the area by boat from Baltimore. Consecrated in 1881, a full generation after the Gothic style had reached its zenith in other parts of the country, the building is evidence of rural Virginia’s slowly evolved architectural taste. St. Stephen’s Parish was originally formed in 1698 and was re-activated in 1824 as part of the reawakening of the Episcopal church in Virginia after the disestablishment.

St. Stephen’s Church