This year the country will be observing the 400th anniversary of the English settlement in Jamestown, Virginia.  The Episcopal Church will be playing a major part in this historical event, and many organizations and groups will be marking the 400th with conferences and observances.

The 400th anniversary of the First Landing will be marked in 2007 by various local commemorations, including an April 26 civic gathering at which Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori is scheduled to attend. Queen Elizabeth II has announced her intention to visit Jamestown in May.

Also there will be a celebration of Virginia Episcopalians on June 24 in Jamestown; a national meeting of Episcopal Church historians is slated for June 24-27 in Williamsburg; the Episcopal Communicators will meet April 25-28 in Virginia Beach.

A brief history

On December 19, 1606, the Virginia Company of London, formed by charter of King James I, dispatched to the New World three ships – the Susan Constant, the Godspeed, and the Discovery — for purposes of colonization and in pursuit of trade routes to Asia.

With some 105 aboard, the ships entered Chesapeake Bay and made landfall on April 26, 1607, at a coastal point the settlers named Cape Henry, near what is now Virginia Beach. This “First Landing” is memorialized by a stone cross at Cape Henry, now a centerpiece of the surrounding First Landing State Park. The monument commemorates the site where, upon their safe arrival, the settlers erected a wooden cross.

Among the settlers was Robert Hunt (1568-1608), priest of the Church of England, from which the Episcopal Church is descended. It was under his leadership that the group offered its first prayer services in the New World, notably on May 13, 1607, when the settlers reached the point they would call “Jamestowne,” the first permanent English settlement in the Americas

At Jamestown the settlers later built a church, but for their first service they suspended “an old saile” between several trees to shelter the congregation, and are said to have fashioned a communion rail by affixing a sapling to two trees. There, the Rev. Mr. Hunt conducted the prayer service, likely from the 1604 Book of Common Prayer. He later led the first service of Holy Communion, in June 1607, on the third Sunday after Trinity Sunday.

The region’s spiritual and cultural history also includes the traditions of the indigenous First Nation peoples, whose contributions are documented by local historians and museum. They are also recognized by the Episcopal Church’s Office of Native American Ministry.