Accomack Parish was carved off from Hungars Parish in 1663, and the first St. James was built in 1767 near present-day Onley to serve congregants in the southeastern reaches of the county. About twenty years later, Drummondtown was chartered as the new county seat - a town with two thriving hotels, furniture and hat-making factories, and a courthouse worth being close to. Parishioners voted with their feet. In 1838 they bought land near the courthouse, dismantled some of the original church for its brick, and built a new St. James in the Greek Revival style that had swept the country. The town outgrew its old name; in 1892 it became Accomac. The church it pulled toward itself is still standing on Drummondtown Road, almost two centuries later.

The vestry hired Jean G. Potts, an itinerant artist who specialized in trompe-l'oeil - literally "fool the eye" - and gave him the entire interior. He covered all four walls beginning at the dado, painted simulated recessed panels rising to a painted cornice, and then ran a row of coffers around the four sides of a barrel-vaulted ceiling that culminates in a scrollwork medallion. The wall behind the chancel got his most lavish treatment: four fluted pilasters supporting an entablature, opening onto a barrel-vaulted apse with its own coffered ceiling, all on a flat wall. A door into the vestry hides inside the painted architecture. In the twentieth century, Linda Croison and Philip Ward restored the frescoes but deliberately left patches of Potts's original work visible at the back of the nave - a small honesty inside the larger illusion.

The exterior is disciplined Greek Revival. Brick walls laid in three-to-one common bond, a tetrastyle Doric portico with a brick floor in herringbone, two doorways topped by a lunette window, a dentil cornice running across the front and down the sides. Inside, slip pews with doors carry Roman numerals. A central staircase rises in twin flights from the rear doors to a shared landing, then a flying stair continues up to the gallery. The only break with the Greek vocabulary is the wooden belfry and spire centered over the front gable: paired columns at each corner frame a lancet-shaped louvered opening, gothic arches floating above an otherwise classical building. It is the small inconsistency that lets the whole composition breathe.

This was the home parish of Henry A. Wise - lawyer, Virginia's 33rd governor, the man who refused to commute John Brown's death sentence in 1859 and then made fiery speeches for secession. His birthplace is still visible from the church's back lawn. When the Civil War came, much of the Eastern Shore was occupied by Union troops, and many nearby churches were damaged or destroyed, including St. George's at Pungoteague. St. James was spared. Union General Henry H. Lockwood listened when Accomac's citizens asked him to keep his soldiers disciplined, and he did. He took over a house abandoned by Dr. Peter Browne as his headquarters - the same house that later became the rectory. The frescoes survived because the people of a small town asked a general to be careful, and he was.

St. James remains an active congregation in the Episcopal Diocese of Southern Virginia, part of St. George's Parish in Pungoteague. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1969 for its Greek Revival design and Potts's frescoes, and it is a contributing building of the Accomac Historic District established in 1992. Services still happen under the painted apse. Light from the lunette still falls onto the gallery stair. Somewhere in the back of the nave, behind the restored work, a few square inches of Potts's original brushwork persist - the actual hand of a traveling artist who, almost two centuries ago, walked into a small Virginia town and painted a building that wasn't there.