Virginia's 56 Churches on the National Register of Historic Places

56 Virginia churches stand on the National Register of Historic Places among the 10,236 congregations in the state's directory, and the list includes some of the oldest church buildings in America. The earliest entries came in November 1969: Little Fork Episcopal Church in Rixeyville, a colonial brick parish church completed in 1776, and Timber Ridge Presbyterian in Lexington, a 1756 stone kirk of the Scots-Irish migration. Hebron Lutheran in Madison (listed 1971) has held services since 1740.

Unusually, no single county dominates: Hanover leads with just 4 listings, and the register churches scatter across the state's colonial tidewater, Piedmont, and valley settlement zones, each layer leaving its own denominational signature.

The complete list of Virginia churches on the National Register

The table lists all 56 Virginia congregations in this directory whose buildings hold National Register of Historic Places listings as of June 11, 2026. Click a column to sort; the county menu filters the list.

When did Virginia churches enter the National Register?

Virginia's listing curve is the steadiest in this series: 11 churches in the 1970s, then between 5 and 11 in every decade since, with 9 already in the 2020s. The state never stopped; its preservation program has worked through the colonial inventory and into Reconstruction-era Black churches and twentieth-century landmarks at an almost constant rate for fifty years.

Which Virginia counties hold the most register-listed churches?

Where the register-listed churches stand: the map

How this list was assembled

The list joins the Churches List directory (10,236 Virginia congregations as of June 11, 2026) against the National Park Service's National Register of Historic Places database by building location and name. 56 matches hold as of the snapshot date; the earliest Virginia church listing dates to 1969. A register listing covers the building, not the congregation, and some listed buildings house congregations younger than the walls. Corrections are applied through the corrections page.

Related reading in The Letter: North Carolina's 122 register-listed churches and Kentucky's 92 frame Virginia's neighbors, and the Episcopal Atlantic corridor follows the colonial parishes up the seaboard. The Virginia state page lists all 10,236 congregations.