Qualla: Huguenot Memorial Chapel and Monument

Huguenot Memorial Chapel and Monument: Introduction

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James Shelton32, CC BY-SA 3.0. In October 1685, Louis XIV revoked the Edict of Nantes and made being a French Protestant illegal overnight. Within fifteen years, several shiploads of those refugees - Huguenots, followers of Calvin who had fled France for England - sailed up the James River past the falls and stepped ashore at a tract of land the Monocans had once cleared. They called the place Manakin towne, and they planted a settlement that would become the largest Huguenot colony in colonial America. The town itself failed within a generation. But twenty miles west of Richmond, on a quiet road through wooded country, a small white chapel still stands as their memorial - and a charred beam beneath its floor may be the oldest surviving fragment of any Huguenot building on this continent.

Image: James Shelton32 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Huguenot Memorial Chapel and Monument: The Refugees Who Came Up the River

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James Shelton32, CC BY-SA 3.0. King William III's government and the Protestant Relief Fund underwrote the cost of resettling about 300 souls on 10,000 acres in what is now Powhatan County. William Byrd I had proposed the project in 1698, less out of charity than calculation - a French settlement upriver would...

Image: James Shelton32 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Huguenot Memorial Chapel and Monument: Four Churches on the Same Hill

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James Shelton32, CC BY-SA 3.0. The first Manakin church was a small octagonal wooden structure, probably built near the James River between Bernard's and Norwood Creeks. A second frame church served the parish from 1710 until it burned around 1729. In 1730-31 the carpenter Francois James raised a third, larger...

Image: James Shelton32 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Huguenot Memorial Chapel and Monument: The Beam Beneath the Floor

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James Shelton32, CC BY-SA 3.0. In September 1985, Calder Loth of the Virginia Division of Historic Landmarks and Edward Chappell of Colonial Williamsburg crawled under the chapel and examined the structural members. What they found supported a tradition the congregation had passed down for decades. The large s...

Image: James Shelton32 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Huguenot Memorial Chapel and Monument: The Monument and the 1937 Dedication

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James Shelton32, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Huguenot Society of the Founders of Manakin in the Colony of Virginia organized in Vallejo, California in 1922 to preserve the memory of their ancestors. By 1936 they had raised enough to commission a light granite plinth, carved with a Huguenot cross and three inscriptions, ...

Image: James Shelton32 | CC BY-SA 3.0

Huguenot Memorial Chapel and Monument: What Remains

Sun, 31 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit James Shelton32, CC BY-SA 3.0. The chapel has been moved twice. In 1954 it was shifted 200 feet south to make room for a fifth Manakin Church - the first built of brick, modeled (somewhat ironically) on William Byrd's English church at Westover rather than any French prototype. In 1985 it moved again, about 30...

Image: James Shelton32 | CC BY-SA 3.0