On a quiet corner where Sophia Street meets the Rappahannock River in downtown Fredericksburg, Virginia, a brick sanctuary has stood since 1890 as the home of Shiloh Baptist Church (Old Site). The congregation has worshipped on this exact site for far longer than that, however: the African American members of what was once a racially mixed Baptist meeting house began gathering separately in 1854, and they have called 801 Sophia Street home ever since. Today the church counts more than five hundred active members and is pastored by the Rev. Dr. Aaron L. Dobynes, Sr., a fourth-generation preacher who came to Shiloh from Shreveport, Louisiana, in 2014. The congregation describes itself as "a spiritually empowered haven of hope, faithfully serving others as God's liberating and transforming word."
An 1890 Sanctuary Listed on the National Register
The present sanctuary is a two-story brick building raised in 1890 by the local firm of C. G. Heflin and Brother, on the ruins of an earlier structure that had collapsed in 1886. The cornerstone was laid on the evening of June 18, 1890, in a ceremony attended by the Garfield Light Infantry and Fredericksburg Lodge No. 4 of the Free Masons, and the new building opened on October 26, 1890. The sanctuary sits on the second floor, as it always has, and curved pews and a small choir loft were added during a 1914 renovation under Pastor John C. Diamond. The front façade was reworked after a devastating 1942 Rappahannock flood, which sent water to within twenty inches of the ground-floor ceiling and destroyed years of church records. In 1976, an educational annex was added, bringing classrooms, offices, an elevator, and accessible restrooms to the campus.
The building is included on the National Register of Historic Places, and the sanctuary's Moller pipe organ, purchased in 1923 through the efforts of the Church Aid Club and a long series of bake sales and pledges, was rebuilt in 2005 and remains in use today. A current capital campaign, the Interior Renovation Project, has identified roughly $221,500 of needed work - drywall and ceiling repairs, plumbing, electrical and HVAC upgrades, accessibility improvements, and acoustics - and contributions are being raised through the congregation's online giving portal.
From a Mixed Meeting House to an African American Congregation, 1804 to 1855
Some local records suggest that the first Baptist meeting house in Fredericksburg was established about 1804, in a wooden building near what is now the train station on Lafayette Boulevard. The congregation included white members, enslaved Black members, and a small number of free Black residents, and Black candidates for membership were examined first by Black brethren and then by a group of white deacons. In 1815, some members withdrew and began meeting in a damaged building along the Rappahannock at what is now 801 Sophia Street. In April 1820, Horace and Elizabeth Marshall sold the lot to the trustees of "the New Baptist Meeting House" for $900, and a brick church known as the Shiloh Baptist Meeting House was raised there in the late 1830s or early 1840s. By the early 1840s the congregation had more than eight hundred members, three-quarters of whom were described in the era's language as "people of color."
Enslaved members sat in side galleries reached by a separate door, where they could be seen from the main floor by the owners who had allowed them to attend. The early Black leadership of the church included the Reverend Armistead Walker, an enslaved gardener and preaching deacon whom the church's own history calls "one of the first ordained colored ministers" in Virginia. Another was Noah Davis, who was licensed to preach in the early 1840s and later published a memoir that helped him buy the freedom of two of his enslaved children. In 2012 the Library of Virginia recognized Davis as one of the "African American Trailblazers" in Virginia history.
The decisive break came in 1854, when Black members began meeting separately on Sunday afternoons in the old building on the river, and in 1855, when the white members moved into a new church at Princess Anne and Amelia streets and "dismissed" all 625 or more of their Black brethren from the rolls. The Black congregation took the name Shiloh with it. The community dates its independent life to 1854 and remembers the year as the founding of a "haven of hope" on the riverbank.
Stony the Road: The Rowe Years and the Civil War
Because Virginia law required a white overseer to be present whenever people of color held worship, George Rowe, a self-educated Fredericksburg merchant, was appointed in 1857 to serve the Black congregation as its legally mandated pastor and overseer. Rowe, who was "ardently opposed to the abolition of slavery," charged $50 a month for his services and in November 1857 baptized eighteen new members in the Rappahannock. The congregation had more than seven hundred members. The actual preaching during Rowe's tenure was carried out by the Black deacons themselves, especially the Reverend Armistead Walker, who shared the pastoral duties with Rowe until his death in 1860. Other African American deacons, including William J. Walker and George L. Dixon, continued to provide much of the spiritual leadership.
When Union troops crossed into Falmouth across from Fredericksburg on Good Friday 1862, an enslaved member of Shiloh named John M. Washington became one of the first African Americans in the area to test President Lincoln's contraband policy by escaping to Union lines. About four hundred of Shiloh's members ultimately fled to Washington and other free areas, and twenty-one of them soon organized a new congregation in the capital, Shiloh Baptist Church of Washington. William J. Walker, a nephew of Armistead Walker, was ordained there and became the founding pastor. Back in Fredericksburg, services were largely suspended. The church building was pressed into service as a hospital and stable; windows, pews, the gallery stairs, and parts of the ceiling were destroyed, and the rear wall of the structure was severely weakened. Rowe resigned as pastor on January 1, 1863, the same day Emancipation took effect, and died three years later.
George Dixon's Return and the Burning of the Old Building
After the war, the Reverend George Dixon, who had been ordained at Nineteenth Street Baptist Church in Washington, returned to Fredericksburg and resumed leadership. On Christmas Eve 1866 he opened Shiloh's first post-war Sabbath School program, and in March 1877 he baptized ninety new converts in a single afternoon at "the old baptizing place" in the Rappahannock, just above the railroad bridge, before a crowd the local press estimated at more than a thousand. He also organized Emancipation Day processions through the streets of the city, led by a Shiloh-based benevolent society called the Good Samaritans, and was active in the local Republican Party. Dixon resigned in 1878 and was succeeded in 1881 by the Reverend Willis Robinson, who raised fifteen hundred dollars toward building repairs. The money was not enough, and on June 11, 1886, the rear wall of the sanctuary collapsed. The building was demolished.
The Reverend James E. Brown, who had assumed the pastorate of those members who wished to stay on the original site, oversaw the laying of a cornerstone for a new sanctuary on June 18, 1890. A court decree of November 30, 1888 had settled the resulting property dispute by dividing the assets of the old Shiloh between the two groups. The congregation that remained at 801 Sophia Street took the name Shiloh Baptist Church (Old Site); the other, which had met at a former industrial building on Princess Anne Street, became Shiloh Baptist Church (New Site). The two sister congregations, together with Mount Zion Baptist Church of Fredericksburg - all three later pastored by Willis Robinson - still share warm ties and jointly maintain the historic Shiloh Cemetery on Monument Avenue.
The Hester Years: Education, The Shiloh Herald, and "Neutral on Nothing"
Following the brief pastorate of John C. Diamond, a Hampton Institute and Howard University graduate who also served as an architect and builder, the Reverend B. H. Hester was installed as pastor in 1922 and served for forty years until his retirement in 1961. A graduate of Biddle University and Virginia Union University, Hester was a writer, educator, and social activist who served as principal of the Fredericksburg Normal and Industrial Institute, the only high school open to African Americans in the area. In 1923 he began a Night School at the church that met three evenings a week and served as many as three hundred students between the ages of sixteen and seventy-five, teaching literacy and civics for a fee of one dollar a month, or free to those without means. In January 1925 he launched The Shiloh Herald, a four-page weekly that delivered local African American news and uncompromising editorials on voting rights, lynching, and segregation. Its masthead motto, "For all things beneficial and uplifting; against all things injurious and detrimental; neutral on nothing," gave its name to a 2019 biography of Hester written by his granddaughter, the Hon. Pamela Bridgewater Awkard, a retired U. S. ambassador.
During Hester's tenure the choir raised money for a Moller pipe organ, the first stained-glass windows were installed, and a flood in October 1942 drove the Rappahannock to within twenty inches of the ground-floor ceiling. In 1949 the church contributed $3,744 toward the construction of a new Mary Washington Hospital, hoping that the new building would end the strict racial segregation of patients.
Dr. Philip Wyatt, the Civil Rights Generation, and the 1950 Commencement
One of the most consequential lay leaders of the Hester years was Dr. Philip Y. Wyatt, Sr., a Charlottesville-born dentist who opened a Fredericksburg practice in 1933 and served Shiloh Old Site as a deacon, clerk, presiding officer, church school teacher, and frequent Sunday morning preacher. Wyatt was secretary of the local NAACP by the 1940s and was elected its Virginia president in 1957. In 1950, when the Walker-Grant High School graduating class of twenty-seven students was told they could hold commencement at the city-owned Community Center only if they entered through a back door, Wyatt and other Shiloh members helped organize a peaceful protest. The class marched in caps and gowns from the front doors of the Community Center to Shiloh Old Site, where the alternative ceremony was held. Shiloh Old Site continued to serve as a staging ground for the city's civil rights efforts, including the 1960 lunch counter sit-ins at Woolworth's, W. T. Grant's, and Peoples Drug Store, in which several young members of the church took part.
The Fifty-Year Pastorate of Lawrence A. Davies
The Reverend Lawrence A. Davies, a Houston native with degrees from Howard University School of Divinity and Wesley Theological Seminary, became pastor on March 4, 1962, and retired exactly fifty years later on March 4, 2012. During his tenure, Shiloh Old Site opened a food pantry, chartered a bus to transport Black schoolchildren to newly integrated schools, helped found the city's Hazel Hill subsidized housing complex, and hosted the annual NAACP state convention in 1963. In 1966 Davies became the first African American elected to Fredericksburg's City Council, and in 1976 he became the city's first Black mayor, a post he held for twenty years and was reelected to four times. The city's central bus station was subsequently named in his honor. He also founded the Fredericksburg Area Sickle Cell Association in 1972 and was a founding pastor of Micah Ecumenical Ministries, the cooperative effort through which downtown churches serve the chronically homeless. He served as pastor emeritus until his death in August 2024.
The Dobynes Years
The Rev. Dr. Aaron L. Dobynes, Sr., a fourth-generation preacher and a native of Selma, Alabama, began as Shiloh's tenth pastor on June 1, 2014. He earned a B. S. in psychology from the University of Alabama, a Master of Divinity from the Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology at Virginia Union University, a Doctor of Ministry from United Theological Seminary in Dayton, Ohio, and a Ph. D. in humanities with a concentration in Martin Luther King, Jr., studies from Union Institute and University. He has pastored churches in Virginia, Alabama, and Louisiana, and during his time at Shiloh he has been active in interfaith work, joining hands with Jewish and Muslim leaders across Fredericksburg. Under his leadership women began serving as deacons rather than deaconesses, and the congregation has publicly welcomed LGBTQ members. Dobynes serves on the boards of the Community Foundation of the Rappahannock River Region and Micah Ecumenical Ministries, and is a founding member of the Epsilon Rho chapter of Sigma Pi Phi, the Omicron Lambda chapter of Alpha Phi Alpha Fraternity, and a thirty-second-degree Mason.
Worship on Sunday Morning
Sunday worship is offered in person and online at 10 a. m. each week, with the service usually including music, prayer, scripture reading, announcements, and a sermon from Pastor Dobynes. Communion at the Lord's Table is observed on the first Sunday of each month. The sanctuary sits on the second floor, and visitors enter through a recessed glass door just to the left of the double red doors on Sophia Street. From there, an elevator to the left reaches the sanctuary, while a double staircase rises to the right.
For decades the church has also maintained a robust schedule of midweek Bible study. A Tuesday morning Bible study meets in the Annex at 811 Sophia Street from 11 a. m. to 12:30 p. m. (except during summer and holiday periods), and a Tuesday evening Bible study meets at 6:30 p. m. via Zoom or phone. Wednesday mornings bring both a phone-based prayer circle at 7:30 a. m. and Home Missions emergency assistance from 9 a. m. to noon. Wednesday evenings begin with a prayer service at 5:45 p. m. and continue with Bible study for adults and youth at 6:30 p. m.
A House of Many Choirs
Music has been central to Shiloh Old Site since 1890, when the church's earliest membership rolls list Sarah Johnson as the organist. Six choirs currently rotate through the Sunday services, and the rotation is published on the church's calendar. The Senior Choir, led by Anita Scott with Eleanor Braxton as president, sings on the first Sunday of each month, accompanied by the rebuilt Moller pipe organ and piano. The Men's Chorus, directed by Karen Bumbrey and accompanied by Phyllis Nelson on piano, sings on the second Sunday, often with Deacon Shelton Johnson on saxophone. The Mass Choir, directed by Donna Armestead-Woolfolk, sings on the third Sunday and at every 8 a. m. service, accompanied by keyboard, guitar, and percussion. A youth choir sings on the fourth Sunday, and the L. A. Davies Chorale - named for the daughter of Pastor Davies - provides music on fifth Sundays. Audio samples of the choirs are available on the church's music pages.
Home Missions: A Food Pantry, a Bus, and a Wednesday Breakfast
The Home Missions Committee, founded by Pastor Davies in 1963 and celebrating its fiftieth anniversary in 2013, runs the church's primary outreach to its Fredericksburg neighbors. Co-chaired by Robbin Edwards and Grace Sprow, with Janice Davies as advisor, the committee keeps a food pantry stocked, helps with prescriptions, and provides limited assistance with rent, mortgages, and utilities. The committee's Wednesday-morning office hours, from 9 a. m. to noon, are reached at 540-656-2395. The committee also organizes Senior Citizens Day on the third Sunday in May, the annual "School Dressing Days" with the Interfaith Council, a Christmas card mail box for intra-church exchanges, small home repairs, grass cutting and limited snow removal for those who cannot manage them, Christmas gifts and food for area families, Thanksgiving baskets, and a loan closet for banquet cloths.
Since 1962 Shiloh Old Site has also been a founding member of Micah Ecumenical Ministries, the cooperative effort through which downtown Fredericksburg churches serve the homeless. The church hosts a free community breakfast every Wednesday morning from 7:30 to 8:30 a. m., and it is one of several congregations supporting the thrice-weekly meal program of the Rappahannock Area Agency on Aging. The congregation also hosts weekly Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and supports the Relay for Life of the American Cancer Society.
Reaching Across the Sea: The Norma Burruss Foreign Missions Ministry
The Foreign Missions Ministry takes its name from the Reverend Norma L. Burruss, a longtime member of Shiloh Old Site who served as a teacher in the Lott Carey mission school in Brewerville, Liberia, beginning in 1971, and who was ordained as a Christian minister on a later trip to the same country. The ministry has provided tuition, uniforms, housing, and supplies to students at the Songhai Center in West Africa, helped build wells in remote villages, contributed to Darfur relief, and supported the Sanctuary of Moses education complex. In 2014 the ministry sent ten thousand dollars in aid to West African communities struggling with Ebola, and adult leaders have led self-funded delegations of women and youth to Ghana. The church has long been a financial supporter of the Lott Carey Foreign Mission Convention in Washington, D. C., and through Lott Carey partners with community-service projects in Ghana and Benin.
Investing in the Next Generation: Youth and Scholarships
The church's youth ministry is organized around the acronym B. U. I. L. D. - Building the Kingdom, Unity, Impact, Leadership, Discipleship - and serves children from preschool through twelfth grade. Children's Church, taught by Mavis Allen, runs every Sunday morning during the worship service in the lower-level multi-purpose room and is open to all children. On the fourth Sunday of each month, the older youth lead parts of the main worship service as part of Youth Sunday. The new Youth Director and Minister is Malik Johnson, a member who grew up in the church's own youth program and is also a high school teacher; he is supported by youth ministry advisors Cori Malone and Roceda Thompson and by Youth Ministry Treasurer DeNae Overton.
Shiloh Old Site is also a national leader in member-funded scholarship ministry. The congregation administers six distinct scholarship funds for its own members, including the Deacon Iretha R. Bumbrey Scholarship for graduating high school seniors, the Alsop-Thornton-Burruss Scholarships for those beginning or continuing higher education, the Lauren A. Davies Scholarship (named for a courageous young member who lived with sickle cell anemia), the Janice Pryde Davies Scholarship for caregivers and skilled-trade aspirants, and the Morris Dabney King and Norma Hatot-King Scholarship for those planning to attend an HBCU or vocational program. The church also helps publicize the Florence Bailey Student Assistance Fund, the Betty J. Hunter Bazemore Scholarship, the Leroy "Buddy" Hamm Scholarship of the Walker-Grant Alumni Association, the Carrie Hill Tatum Memorial Scholarship of the local Delta Sigma Theta chapter, and the Eliza Bumbrey Williams Memorial Scholarship.
Two scouting programs meet at the church during the school year, and the church's five Scout units are open to all interested children and youth, whether or not their families belong to Shiloh. Vacation Bible School is held annually.
A Welcome Without Walls
The congregation states plainly that "God has no outcasts" and that there should be "no walls of exclusion, no barriers to God's grace." Visitors are welcomed at any service. Those who enter through the red double doors face a few steps, but those who use the recessed glass door to the left can step inside at street level and ride the elevator to the sanctuary. The church's free mini-bus, equipped with a wheelchair lift, picks up riders throughout the greater Fredericksburg area on Sundays and on other occasions; reservations can be made through the church office. The 10 a. m. service is livestreamed on the church's YouTube channel, and a recorded archive of recent Sundays, funerals, and special events is available there. Past audio samples of the Senior Choir, the Men's Chorus, and the Mass Choir can be heard on the music pages of the website.
For more than a century and a half, the members of Shiloh Old Site have met at this corner to pray, to sing, to organize, to feed the hungry, to teach the illiterate, to bury their dead in the Shiloh Cemetery on Monument Avenue, and to send their children out into the world. The Thanksgiving sunrise service that began in 1865, when the recently returned Reverend George Dixon called his flock to the corner of Sophia and Hanover before they went to work, still draws worshippers at 6 a. m. each Thanksgiving morning. The annual Homecoming and Revival each October brings former pastors and guest preachers from across the country, including the sister congregation Shiloh Baptist Church (New Site). The six choirs still sing, the food pantry is still open on Wednesday mornings, the scholarships are still awarded each June, and the doors of 801 Sophia Street are still open.
Beliefs and Practice
Shiloh Baptist Church (Old Site) is a Baptist congregation in the historic African American tradition, in cooperative relationship with the Baptist General Convention of Virginia, the Progressive National Baptist Convention, and the Lott Carey Foreign Mission Convention. The church follows the practice of believer's baptism by immersion, observes the Lord's Supper on the first Sunday of each month, and ordains both women and men to ministry. The ministerial team grounds its work in the verses from Isaiah that Jesus quoted in the synagogue at Nazareth, declaring good news to the poor, freedom for prisoners, recovery of sight for the blind, and liberty for the oppressed. The church teaches that the Spirit of the Lord is at work in the world and that the congregation is called, in the words of its own statement, to be "Christ embodied - a congregation reflecting God's holy love."