The Reverend Robert Hunt Holds the First Church of England Service at Jamestown

Forty eight years after Parliament established the Church of England by the Act of Uniformity in 1559, already recorded here, and thirty eight years before the Interregnum suppressed Anglican worship across England in 1645, also recorded here, the Reverend Robert Hunt carried the Church of England across the Atlantic to its first permanent American foothold. Hunt had sailed with the Virginia Company's first expedition in December 1606, and when the settlers made landfall at Cape Henry on 29 April 1607 he delivered what colonists' own accounts describe as one of the earliest Protestant sermons preached in America, giving thanks for their safe arrival. Weeks later, after the company chose the peninsula they named Jamestown, Hunt held the settlement's first service of worship under a sailcloth awning strung between trees, and the small congregation partook of Holy Communion there soon afterward, the earliest celebration of the sacrament in a permanent English colony. Hunt organized the daily rhythm the Virginia colony's religious life would keep for generations, morning and evening prayer, two sermons every Sunday, and communion every three months, conducted from a canvas shelter until timber and later a proper wooden church could be raised. He died within the colony's first year, in 1608, but the parish he founded survived Jamestown's early famine and disease to become the foundation on which the whole Church of England presence in Virginia, and eventually the American Episcopal Church, was built. Historians of colonial religion treat Hunt's canvas covered service as the true beginning of Anglicanism's institutional life in what would become the United States, predating the Pilgrims' arrival at Plymouth by thirteen years.