Three thousand miles across the Atlantic from London and one hundred miles inland from the Chesapeake port town that linked the colonies with the mother country lay the frontier outpost of Winchester. Its founder, James Wood, Sr., named the tiny 1740's settlement for a familiar English cathedral city. It was a fitting location for the first parish church to be built in that part of England's Old Dominion west of the Blue Ridge Mountains.

The established Anglican Church of the colony had arrived in Virginia in 1607 at Jamestown. However, European settlers had come to the Shenandoah Valley nearly two decades before Virginia's Colonial Legislature created the county and parish called Frederick, one of two new counties carved from Orange County. Dissenting Protestants in the Valley who disagreed with the doctrines, rites, or government of the established church were already holding worship services according to their own practice.

By 1744 the first members of the Vestry were being elected and charged by Virginia law with building a church, employing a minister, and carrying out other civic and social responsibilities. The old law also required church wardens to bring persons into court who did not attend church once a month. In May of 1744, James Wood, one of two elected church wardens, asked the county court for permission to set aside some of his land near Shawnee Springs as a town and county seat. Mr. Wood laid out 26 half-acre lots; 22 of which were sold to the county for resale to individuals. The other four lots were set aside for the courthouse, jail, parish church, and cemetery. Thus the county government and the parish church gained promise of a place at the same time with the founding of Winchester. These lots are located at the present corner of Loudoun and Boscawen Streets where a recently installed marker describes the early church history.

In 1749, Thomas 6th Baron Fairfax of Cameron settled in Frederick County near present White Post in Clarke County. Fairfax drew to the area a number of settlers of English background who took a leading role in promoting the established church in Frederick. However, those English influences did not prove dominant. The Shenandoah Valley took its population cue from Pennsylvania rather than eastern Virginia. In Pennsylvania, proprietor William Penn had encouraged German Lutherans, Reformed, Anabaptists, and Ulster Scots Presbyterians as well as the Quakers for whom his colony was a refuge. Early European settlement in the great Valley of Virginia was, like Pennsylvania, a patchwork of these ethnic and denominational identities.

By the late 1740s a crude wooden church had been completed adjacent to the courthouse, amid much controversy concerning the mismanagement of Vestry funds. But as the French and Indian War drew to a close, the Parish and the Vestry were in a fairly strong position. A new stone church would be completed about 1766 and was considered one of the finest buildings in Winchester.

Sunday services of that time period would seem very strange to a modern congregation. In many Virginia parishes, men sat on one side of a center aisle, and women sat on the other side. There were no prayer books, no choir and no hymns sung. The only music consisted of Psalms, which the lay reader lined out using a pitch pipe. The minister usually read a sermon after Morning Prayer and the Litany.

Winchester was at that time a prosperous town with a population approaching 1,000. It was the trade center of the valley on the Great Wagon Road from Pennsylvania to the southwest. There were many roads leading to ports where goods could be shipped to and from England.

By December 1774, the movement towards American Independence was well underway. Frederick Parish Rector, the Rev. Charles Thruston was chair of the Frederick County Committee on Safety, a shadow revolutionary Frederick County government. In the summer of 1774, Rev. Thruston had directed a meeting of freeholders to draft a protest of the closing of the port of Boston following the Boston Tea Party. The protest documents, known as the "Frederick Resolves", condemned the action of the English Parliament and warned of civil war that could dissolve the union between mother country and colonies.

The last revolutionary convention in which Rev. Thruston and Vestryman James Wood Jr. sat, adopted George Mason's Virginia Bill of Rights, providing that "all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion according the dictates of conscience".

The 1827 diocesan convention was important in the Parish annals as the time when Frederick Parish took the name Christ Church. Almost immediately after the convention, members of the church launched a campaign to tear down the old stone church and build a larger "fashionable" one a few blocks away. By the time a deed to the new location was recorded on October 6, 1828, the deed described "a lot on which stands a new unfinished building for an Episcopal Church". The cornerstone for the present day church was laid on June 24, 1828 on lot Number 6 laid out by James Wood in 1758, fronting Boscawen Street.

Darkness and despair would engulf the region as the nation entered the Civil War in April 1861. Winchester suffered horribly during the four-year conflict. Situated at the northern end of the Shenandoah Valley, Winchester was strategically important to both sides. Occupying armies rampaged through Winchester with it changing hands more than seventy times. The Union forces presence in the town for twenty of the war's forty-nine months was particularly frustrating to the town's citizens as most sympathized with the southern cause.

Without a regular minister and under martial law much of the time, Christ Church had regular church services only sporadically during 1861-1863. In the absence of regular Services, the various congregations of the area banded together under the leadership of the Episcopalians and held nighttime prayer meetings in private homes on Sundays and Wednesdays.

Shortly after the 1864 battle at Winchester, a Union soldier recorded his impressions:

Winchester is a beautiful place, or, rather, has been, and is very compactly built. Now the stores and public buildings are all deserted, and there are very few male inhabitants that are not over sixty years of age. Only the Episcopal Church is open - the lights being pretty much all smashed out of the windows when we came here.

Smashed windows seemed to be the most severe damage suffered by the church during the Civil War. Spiritually, however, the congregation was hit hard until the war ended and the Rev. William Meredith, Rector of Christ Church, returned from the fighting. The task of rebuilding the congregation and assisting the citizens of the war torn town in rising from the ashes lay ahead for Rev. Meredith.

As the church approached the 20th and, then, the 21st centuries, the needs of an increasingly urbanized church seem almost endless. But, the story of a faith community such as Christ Church is the story of building for a faithful future.

This short summary of the history of Christ Church is drawn from Brown, Katherine L., et. al. The History of Christ Church, Frederick Parish, Staunton, VA: Lot's Wife Publishing, 2001.