St. John’s, founded in 1610, is the oldest church in continuous service in English-speaking North America. As the church was in the community when the first documented Africans arrived at Point Comfort in 1619, the church would play a part in their history too.
In late August of 1619, a Dutch ship, the White Lion, docked at Point Comfort, which gradually became Old Point Comfort and then Fort Monroe in 1834, after President James Monroe. The ship carried some “20-and-odd” Africans that the captain had captured from a Spanish ship in the Caribbean. These Africans had been first seized in Angola, on the western coast of Africa, and placed on a slave ship headed to Central and South America. Of the 300 plus who left Africa, these few remained unsold. As the captain needed food and supplies for his return to England, as well as space for cargo, likely tobacco, he traded these Africans “for victuals” to colonists.
Although we do not know where everyone went, we do know that Anthony and Isabell were taken by Captain William Tucker, whose plantation was in the area of today’s Bluebird Gap Farm. William Tucker had come to the colony of Virginia in 1610 as a young man seeking his fortune. A hard worker, he had acquired land and was eventually named a commander for the Borough of Kecoughtan, for which he was given the rank of Captain. Active in the Church at Kecoughtan, part of the Church of England and the ancestor of our church today, he had been asked to plan a new church building to the east of its presumed first location near LaSalle Avenue and Church Creek. (He also later brought the communion silver to the new church from Jamestown in 1627.) As Kecoughtan became the Borough of Elizabeth City in 1620, this second church, completed in 1624, was called the Elizabeth City Parish Church.
Anthony and Isabell married and had a son, who was presumably baptized in 1624. It is noted that the three at that time were the only African servants of the Tuckers, who also had 14 white servants and one Indian servant. As Captain Tucker was so active in his church, the child was most likely baptized in the new Elizabeth City Parish Church, as possibly were also Anthony and Isabell. The couple named their son William Tucker. This William Tucker is considered the ancestor of the historic Tucker family, recognized as the oldest documented African family in English-speaking North America, some members of whom live in Hampton today.
In 2015 the City of Hampton appointed a group of citizens to the Hampton 2019 Commemorative Commission to plan events commemorating the arrival in 1619 of these first Africans to English-speaking North America, right here in our community.
(Historical information is from How Firm a Foundation by James Tormey.)
Originally published in St. John’s Epistle, February 2019.