Williamsburg As discussions regarding Confederate monuments continue across Virginia and the south, Williamsburgs historical Bruton Parish Episcopal Church is joining in.

A Confederate memorial plaque on the wall of the church sanctuary recognizes the Confederate soldiers who died in the Battle of Williamsburg. Following the Confederate retreat from Yorktown in May 1862, Union troops advanced on them just outside of Williamsburg. The battle ended with the Confederate troops retreating to Richmond, and resulted in 2,283 casualties.

The last line on the parishs memorial plaque reads, They died for us.

According to the parishs rector, the Rev. Chris Epperson, the parish no longer holds the same sentiments. As a result, the church is working to re-interpret the plaque.

Its continued to come up over time, time and time again, so the decision was made very recently, to address the plaque, Epperson said. We decided to do is to contextualize it with a plaque beside the confederate memorial and then to address directly the line, they died for us.

The church met with members of the community and held a series of discussions about the memorial. Ultimately, it decide it would not take the plaque down, but instead, use it as a tool.

According to the churchs Senior Warden of Vestry Melinda Morgan, the contextualization of the memorial is an ongoing process and this is only the early stages as the church learns more about its history and acknowledges its role in slavery.

There is a desire and an interest to do this and it will have a beginning and an end, Morgan said. I think a personal goal and quest is talking to a lot of people to contextualize it and get it up and then focus on how we move forward.

According to Epperson, conversations regarding its memorial have been ongoing since 2002 as parish members raised objections to the last line.

After numerous years of going back and forth on the memorial, it came to the forefront of discussion in 2017 during a forum held by the church and its members.

Bruton Parish is older than the country and this is an important piece of the history of the country, Epperson said. We wanted to keep the plaque as a memorial and also as a way to enable us to tell part of the story of the history it bears.

While it is unclear when the plaque was first placed in the church, Epperson said the wording suggests it was a part of the Lost Cause movement.

The Lost Cause movement was a pseudohistorical mythology perpetuated by the Daughters of the Confederacy in the 1890s that centered around a narrative that the Confederate states actions were heroism and not the continuation of slavery.

During this period, numerous confederate monuments, including those recently removed from Richmonds Monument Ave., were constructed 30 to 50 years after the Civil Wars end.

In terms of its own history, Epperson said the church benefitted from slavery as the church was built by numerous laborers including those that were enslaved.

Thats how weve approached the whole thing to continue to be able to tell the story and the complete story, Epperson said. We are really geared toward telling a more complete history of the parish, and recognizing the role of the enslaved.

For more information, visit brutonparish.org.

Em Holter. emily.holter@virginiamedia.com, 757-256-6657, @EmHolterNews.

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Williamsburgs historic Bruton Parish Episcopal Church to ...