history far beyond county lines. John Leland took over as pastor in 1777 and was instrumental in the creation of the U.S. Constitution, thanks to his petitions to Virginia legislator James Madison for religious freedom. “Government should protect every man
in thinking and speaking freely, and see that one does not abuse another,” Leland wrote. “T e liberty I contend for is more than toleration…all should be equally free, Jews, Turks, Pagans and Christians." “T e story of religious liberty in our
nation and our world is rooted in the story of Culpeper and Culpeper Baptist,” said Dan Carlton, the church’s current pastor.
Preserving renowned art Take a drive south of town and Mitchells
Presbyterian Church also is iconic — for what’s on its walls and ceiling. T e congregation’s origins date to 1844 when a burgeoning group of believers founded a chapel on James Somerville’s plantation. T e wealthy Scottish planter himself had found God, having “persevered in a course so manifestly Christian and consistent that even worldly men were sometimes heard to
The lock and key from the Culpeper Jail that imprisoned the Baptist preachers in 1760-1770s.
ascribe to a miracle the change in his case,” according to a relative’s biography. Mitchells adopted its current name by
1888, and in that same year Somerville’s descendants commissioned the artist Joseph Dominick Phillip Oddenino to paint murals inside the church. Shrouded in mystery, the “hobo painter” was said to wander through the Virginia Piedmont with 200 cats in tow and, perhaps, have been an exiled Italian count. While he was quite the character, he
was also quite the artist: Oddenino’s murals deceive the eye’s perspective using the French-phrased technique of trompe-l’oeil
VIRGINIA BAPTIST HISTORICAL SOCIETY
or a realistic optical illusion. T e fresco paintings of columns, Gothic arches and Renaissance cornices appear to be three- dimensional. "T e murals are unique, some of the
very fi nest trompe-l'oeil paintings in the United States," University of Virginia architecture professor Richard Guy Wilson said in 1984, when an extensive restoration project saved the then-decaying church and Oddenino’s murals. Now four decades later, Mitchells
endures as a registered landmark on both the Virginia Historic Landmarks Register and the National Register of Historic Places. Even as Culpeper County changed
around Mitchells, Little Fork and the Burgandine House, these institutions forged ahead — and have become linchpins of the county’s historical record. “T e names of rivers have changed from
Hedgemans to the Rappahannock and from Goardvine to the Hazel. Some towns have disappeared, such as Oak Shade,” said Don Stockton, Little Fork Episcopal Church’s historian. “Over time our records become historical documents that … can help provide clues to (the) ancestral past.”
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