Before the English came, this land was the homeland of the Accawmacke, an Algonquian-speaking people who had built a network of small towns up and down the Delmarva Peninsula. The colonists who arrived in the 1630s adopted the name Accawmake Shire for their new outpost and gave it one of the eight original shires of Virginia. The first clergyman assigned to the area was the Reverend Francis Bolton. The Reverend John Cotton patented land here and served as the parish's second rector from about 1632 to 1645. When his vestryman Robert Vaughn died that last year, his bequest of tobacco was used to build a wooden church called Nussawattocks. Hungars Parish was organized in 1642 with King's Creek as its boundary, and in 1663 Accomac Parish was carved out of its northern reaches. By 1690 a wooden church stood at Church Neck, by Magothy Bay, and the parish had begun the slow work of putting roots into the marshy ground.

In 1653 a wealthy vestryman named Stephen Charlton, who had quarreled with the Reverend Cotton, donated land for a glebe to support the parish minister and may have funded the construction of a church. Two years later he was dead. His will left his estate to the church on the condition that his daughters die first, an unusual but legally binding provision. One daughter was married at the age of twelve and died shortly afterward in childbirth, a tragedy of a kind common enough in the seventeenth century to be unremarkable in the records but devastating to the family. Litigation over the Charlton estate dragged on for over a century, flaring again in the early 1800s after the disestablishment of the Episcopal Church. The Glebe of Hungar's Parish remained the official rectory from 1745 until 1850. The last rector to live at the glebe was the Reverend Francis Upton.

The current Hungars Church is the third parish church of Hungars Parish, built around 1742, likely prompted by the establishment in 1731 of a ferry from nearby Hungars Creek to York and Hampton. The new brick church was, before the Revolution, the second-largest in Virginia. A will from 1759 mentions a "new church on Hungar's Creek," confirming the date. The disestablishment of the Episcopal Church around 1802 emptied both the Magothy and Hungars chapels, which were stripped and abandoned. The parishioners met in the Eastville courthouse for years. The communion silver and alms basin were carefully preserved. The church came back to life in 1819 as the local economy revived, and a major renovation followed in 1851 by a contractor from Snow Hill, Maryland; the building was shortened from ninety-two feet to about seventy-four feet, and the gallery, which had once held seating for the people the church did not welcome below, including the enslaved people who attended services in segregation, was reworked. The renovation reduced the building's footprint to what stands today.

Since 1828 the parish has had two churches. Christ Church at Eastville was built that year on land donated by Severn E. Parker of Kendall Grove, replacing the abandoned Magothy chapel. Both churches stand today; both are on the National Register; Christ Church is part of the Eastville Historical District. Hungars Church was added to the National Register in 1970. The brick is laid in Colonial style with four-bay north and south facades, two-bay end walls, and a gable roof with a modillioned cornice; the cornice, roof, and floor may date from 1922 renovations. Air conditioning came in 1985; the pulpit was renovated in 1991-92. Sunday services continue. The communion silver that Martha Washington's first father-in-law donated almost three hundred years ago still sits on the altar at Hungars, polished, used.