Administrative Information

Access Restrictions

Collection is open to research.

Use Restrictions

There are no restrictions.

Preferred Citation

Hebron Lutheran Church (Madison, Va.). [cite specific records used and dates]. Accession 42245. Church records collection, The Library of Virginia, Richmond, Virginia.

Acquisition Information

Purchased in October 2005.

Biographical/Historical Information

Hebron Lutheran Church is the oldest Lutheran congregation in Virginia and the South, and worships in the oldest Lutheran church building in continuous use. While the first Lutherans who came to Virginia in 1717 settled near a German colony of Reformed members, and shared a close association with them, Hebron was never a union church. Organized in 1717 and built in 1740, the church has been in the following counties: Essex, 1717; Spotsylvania, 1721 (moved 1725); Orange, 1734; Culpeper, 1749; and Madison, 1793. For more information, see History of the Hebron Lutheran Church, Madison County, Virginia, from 1717 to 1907 , by William Peter Huddle, 1908, and Hebron Lutheran Church: A Brief History, 1717-1974 , by Jeannie Edna Light, 1974.

Scope and Content

Records, 1871-1882 and n.d., including an 1871 account by pastor Henry Wetzel (1816-1890) of the 1868 creation of the Evangelical Lutheran Concordia Synod of Virginia. Wetzel's history was intended to refute criticisms made by the Tennessee Synod, from which Concordia had extricated itself. In addition to this manuscript, the collection also contains lengthy notes on the origins and history, through 1882, of Hebron Church, now located in Madison County, Virginia. Among the notes is a handwritten copy of a 1737 pamphlet written by Johann Caspar Stover (d. ca. 1738), the congregation's first official pastor, to solicit funds from Evangelicals in his native Germany.