James Wren

James Wren was born approximately 1728 in Fairfax County, Virginia and died there in 1815, age approximately eighty-seven. He is the best-documented gentleman-architect of colonial Northern Virginia — a vestryman, justice of the peace, and landowner whose architectural commissions established the Georgian-meeting-house vocabulary of the late-colonial Anglican parish church in the Northern Neck.

The three surviving Wren churches

Wren designed and supervised the construction of three surviving colonial Anglican parish churches in Northern Virginia, all completed in the early 1770s:

• 118 North Washington Street Place 118 North Washington Street Alexandria's Georgian-style Episcopal parish church, consecrated in 1773; pew owners included George Washington and, decades later, the Lee family. in Alexandria, designed 1767 and consecrated 1773 — the most-visited of the three, with George Washington Person George Washington b. 1732 · d. 1799 Planter, military commander, and first President of the United States. Master of Mount Vernon from 1761 until his death in 1799, and a regular presence in Alexandria, which he … and the Lee family among its original pew owners. Wren is documented in the parish vestry-book records as the architect of record; the brick mason was Robert Adam.

• Falls Church in the City of Falls Church, Virginia, completed 1769. The church gave the city its name.

• Pohick Church in southern Fairfax County, completed 1774. George Washington served on its building committee. The Confederate occupation of Northern Virginia 1861–62 stripped the building’s interior; the structure was restored in the twentieth century.

All three churches share Wren’s signature Georgian-meeting-house vocabulary: brick over a stone water table, rectangular plan with two-tier window arrangement, low hipped roof, and a stone pulpit-end altar wall flanked by tablets of the Decalogue and Lord’s Prayer.

Wren had no formal architectural training — gentleman-architect was the standard arrangement of the colonial South, where designs were drafted by educated landowners working from English pattern books and supervised by the master masons and carpenters who held the actual construction trades. Wren’s library is documented in his estate papers as having included James Gibbs’s A Book of Architecture and Batty Langley’s Builder’s Director — two pattern books that would have supplied the elevations and details for his three church commissions.

Civil career

Wren served on the Fairfax County vestry, as a justice of the peace, and as colonel of the Fairfax County militia during the Revolutionary War. He owned the Long Branch plantation in western Fairfax County, where he died in 1815. He is interred at Falls Church.