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Around 1855 this Gothic revival style church, named Grace Episcopal, was built in the village of Woodville in Western Bertie County only a few miles from the high banks of the Roanoke River. Because its low ground was surrounded by the swamps of the Cashie River, the eastern port village of Windsor was thought by many of the wealthier people to be unhealthy to live in due to their belief that malaria was spread through the swamp mist. As a result, Woodville, with higher ground and less mosquitoes, offered a safer place to live for plantation owners who, as a whole, tended to be members of the Episcopal Church. As a result, parishioners of Grace Episcopal were few in numbers as compared with other local denominations. This was the case with the Episcopal Church in colonial North Carolina and the future Pre-Civil War State of North Carolina as Quakers and Methodists mainly dominated the region.
Post Revolutionary War Eastern North Carolina, both colonial and state, witnessed an even further decline in membership in the Episcopal Church because of the lingering animosity towards the British and the close ties the Episcopal Church seemed to have with the Church of England. Coupled with period agricultural practices that left land virtually unproductive, both of these factors contributed to the dwindling plantation families of Grace and its village of Woodville. Because crop rotation was not yet known or practiced, and cotton was "King" in the region, land originally yielding two and half bales per acre was later only yielding a half a bale per acre. Children of the plantation owners were sent to Georgia, Mississippi, and Louisiana to purchase more fertile land to keep the family agricultural business in continuity.
Lewiston-Woodville native, Molly Urquhart, told me that Grace remained active with many members until the early 1960's; However, according to local historian Harry Thompson, many of the original plantation families that attended Grace relocated to the Southwest after the Civil War, to escape the region's heavy federal occupation during Reconstruction. Census books in the Bertie County Courthouse reveal a “GT” written beside many of these peoples' names to abbreviate “Gone to Texas”.
