Lorton / Pohick Church

The Pohick Episcopal Church web site [www.pohick.org/history.html] informs: "the baptismal font, which dates to eleventh or twelfth century England. Taken from a monastery, it was shipped to the colony for liturgical use at Pohick. It continues to be used for baptisms today." Slaughter's history of the Truro Parish in Virginia (1907), however, writes that in 1773: "William Copein having undertaken to make a Stone Font for the Church according to a draught in the 15th plate in Langleys Designs being the uppermost on the left hand for the price of six pounds he finding himslef everything, the Vestry agree to pay him the sum for finishing same", although the same source records that on November 22 Alexander Henderson, one of the churchwardens, was "rdered to pay William Copein seven pounds, five shillings for a stone Font and Step." Slaughter (ibid.) notes that the Statute of Religious Freedom of 1785, together with the Act for Incorporating the Protestant Episcopal Church, meant the disestablishment of this church and few services carried out in it, with reports as late as 1841 of dilapidation and decay. In 1861, continues Slaughter, during the incumbency of Rev. R.T. Brown, the rehabilitation of Pohick Church was undertaken, at which time the stone font "was afterwards discovered in a neighboring farmyard where it had been used as a trough." The object, which does not quite conform any particular font style of the 11th- or 12th-century England and may therefore be a local product of 18th-century Virginia, is roughly hemispherical with four protrusions at 90-degree angles at the upper rim, which appears to be of a polished dark stone; the sides of the basin are plain but one of them has been inscribed with the date "1773"; the octagonal pedestal base is modern.