Religion: Pocahontas’ Chapel

The first American woman ever to settle in England was Pocahontas, daughter of Powhatan, chief of the Chickahominy tribe. She moved there in 1616 with her husband John Rolfe and their son-Thomas.* But English life was too drastic a change from tidewater Virginia. By the next year she was dead—whether of tuberculosis, smallpox or possibly loneliness, historians have never agreed.

Through the centuries, the church where Pocahontas was buried, St. George’s at Gravesend, fell into disrepair; Gravesend itself, a Thames dock area, became a rundown parish. But in 1947, a new vicar, the Rev. Richard Daunton-Fear, arrived and began an energetic campaign to restore the parish churches. Last week, after four years of fundraising, St. George’s Church, newly named a “Chapel of Unity,” was rededicated. It is now a spruce Georgian structure with arched windows and a fine Jacobean altar rail.

In honor of Pocahontas. British and American flags hung side by side in the chancel last week, and another old Virginian, Lady Astor, helped to inaugurate it as “a symbolic shrine of Anglo-American relations.”

-Among her later descendants: Lady Mountbatten, the second Mrs. Woodrow Wilson, Lord Baden-Powell.