The Old Stone Church

The Church of the Ascension is blessed to worship in one of Centreville’s historic landmarks. Known for generations as the Old Stone Church, the building has witnessed more than a century and a half of worship, war, rebuilding, and community life. Today it remains what it was built to be—a house of prayer.

A historic house of worship in the heart of Centreville

From Methodist Church to Civil War Hospital

The Old Stone Church was originally built in 1853 by the congregation of the Centreville Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Constructed of local stone, it stood only a few years before the outbreak of the American Civil War placed Centreville directly in the path of armies moving across Northern Virginia.

In 1861, the church became the site of a Union Army surgical hospital and received wounded soldiers following the Battle of Blackburn’s Ford and the First Battle of Manassas. It was again used during the campaigns surrounding the Second Battle of Manassas in 1862.

As control of Centreville shifted between Union and Confederate forces, the church served military needs on both sides. By the later years of the war, much of the building’s interior woodwork—including its pews, flooring, and pulpit—had been removed for use by soldiers, leaving little more than the stone shell.

The congregation rebuilt the church after the war, using the surviving stone walls and materials from the original structure. The restored church once again became a place of Christian worship.

A Church Rebuilt for a New Generation

The Methodist congregation continued to worship at the Old Stone Church well into the twentieth century.

During the 1940s, a parish or Sunday School hall was added to the historic sanctuary. Parish tradition remembers returning servicemen as having taken part in its construction following the Second World War.

The congregation that had worshipped there for generations eventually built a larger church elsewhere in Centreville. In 1973, the historic building was sold to the Church of the Ascension.

Ascension Comes to the Old Stone Church

The Church of the Ascension acquired the property in December 1973. The parish's history records the purchase as taking place on December 6, the Feast of St. Nicholas of Myra.

Ascension celebrated its first services in the Old Stone Church on the Fourth Sunday in Advent, December 23, 1973.

Since that time, generations of parishioners have worshipped within these historic walls—celebrating the Holy Eucharist, baptizing new Christians, witnessing marriages, commending the departed to God, and continuing the daily life of the Church in a building that has survived both war and tremendous change in the surrounding community.

According to parish records, the Church of the Ascension was also among the founding parishes of the Anglican Catholic Church and of the Diocese of the Mid-Atlantic States.

A Living House of Prayer

The Old Stone Church is more than an historic building or Civil War landmark. It remains a living church.

The same walls that sheltered wounded soldiers more than 160 years ago now surround a congregation gathered for the worship of Almighty God. Its history is important to us, but its purpose has not ended with history.

Here the Church still gathers, the Scriptures are proclaimed, the Sacraments are administered, and the ancient worship of the Christian Church continues from generation to generation.