2026 SESSION
ENROLLED
HOUSE RESOLUTION NO. 107
Commending Mt. Gazerine Baptist Church.
Agreed to by the House of Delegates, February 16, 2026
WHEREAS, the church is among those “mediating institutions,” in the phrase of Tocqueville, in the early years of the American republic, that provide a bulwark of freedom from the state for the individual and for the free individual in association with others; and
WHEREAS, Mt. Gazerine Baptist Church of Blackstone, in Nottoway County, has been such a bulwark, and such a communion for Christian believers, since the wartime year of 1864; and
WHEREAS, it was “sometime in 1864,” according to the Reverend Dr. Irene B. Allen, pastor of Mt. Gazerine, that, “a group of recently freed Negroes came together to worship in Spirit and Truth”; and
WHEREAS, Mt. Gazerine Baptist Church's first locale was, Rev. Dr. Allen continues, drawing on documents composed by her grandmother, Cordelia Bagley, “a ‘brush harbor' near the Big Nottoway River,” a brush harbor being “a makeshift building constructed from wood poles and brushes. Builders of the brush harbor were James Lee, William Amphy, Jerry Greenhill, Mrs. Rebecca Dagner (an ancestor [of] Pastor Irene B. Allen), James Amphy,” and unremembered others; and
WHEREAS, the first pastor of Mt. Gazerine Baptist Church was Reverend Lee Rather, and it was he who guided the church to build its first framed, wood building, a structure that was destroyed by fire in the 1930s; and
WHEREAS, subsequently, Mt. Gazerine Baptist Church built its present building, singing “Praise God from Whom All Blessings Flow”; and