Piney Grove Primitive Baptist Church: A Black Founding Site of Pittsylvania County – Chatham Star-Tribune

Clear skies this evening will become overcast overnight. Low 43F. Winds light and variable..
Clear skies this evening will become overcast overnight. Low 43F. Winds light and variable.
Updated: December 24, 2025 @ 10:56 pm

As America’s 250th anniversary approaches in 2026, the nation is preparing to turn its eyes toward the familiar icons of the founding story: the Founding Fathers, red, white, and blue celebrations, Jamestown, Mount Vernon, and, closer to home, the Sutherlin Mansion, where Jefferson Davis spent the final days of the Confederacy.
But hidden in plain sight are other historic places, built not by presidents or generals, but by the hands and hopes of Black Americans. If you’ve ever noticed what looks like a fingerprint pressed into an old brick on a plantation house, you were likely staring at the imprint of someone enslaved. At Oak Hill Plantation in Pittsylvania County, bricks were made onsite by enslaved artisans who also constructed the main house.
During America’s anniversary year, we must elevate our local landmarks, especially those tied to African American resilience, community-building, and survival. My goal is to bring these overlooked places to the forefront and document what they meant to Black people in Pittsylvania County.
One of the earliest and most enduring of these sites is Brosville’s Piney Grove Primitive Baptist Church, roughly seven miles north of the Oak Hill Plantation.
As Henry Wiencek noted in The Hairstons: An American Family in Black and White, Piney Grove was among the first institutions established by formerly enslaved people from Oak Hill after emancipation. Built around 1885, just twenty years after the Civil War, it became both a spiritual home and a schoolhouse for Black families navigating newfound freedom.
John Breedlove, born in 1867, was part of that first generation of Black landowners. Land meant independence, citizenship, and dignity, the difference between farming under someone else and farming for one’s own future. According to Dr. Howard Adams, whose family descends from Oak Hill’s enslaved community, Breedlove donated a portion of his land for the church. He and Dr. Adams’s grandfather, Elder Jube Adams (Jube the Elder), provided the timber — roughly 60% from Breedlove and 40% from Adams — to help raise the original structure.
I didn’t know that the building beside my grandfather Calvin Adams’s home was constructed using his grandfather’s land and labor.
Both church and school operated under one roof, as was true for many early Black institutions across the South. What stood at Piney Grove was not simply a building; it was the declaration of a people stepping into citizenship, literacy, and self-determination.
Piney Grove emerged just after a brief window (1865–1877) when more than 80 Black legislators held office in Virginia, before the violent rollback of Reconstruction. Only two years before its founding, the Danville Massacre of 1883 made national headlines.
Yet in that climate, the families of Oak Hill still built Piney Grove. Still created a school. Still claimed land. Still worshipped in freedom.
That survival and refusal to disappear are themselves of historical significance.
This history is why I wrote The Black Belt of Virginia: Untold Stories of African American History, a book documenting the achievements of Black Virginians whose stories rarely make the official narratives.
It’s also why community members are seeking to establish an official historical marker for Piney Grove Primitive Baptist Church. The site qualifies: it predates Jim Crow, was built by emancipated families, and remains one of Pittsylvania County’s foundational Black institutions.
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Gilliam Nii Lighter

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