William Meade

William Meade was born at Lucky Hit, Frederick County, Virginia, in 1789 — the son of Richard Kidder Meade, an aide-de-camp to George Washington during the Revolution. He was educated at home and at Princeton (B.A. 1808), read theology privately, and was ordained a deacon in the Episcopal Church in 1811 and a priest in 1814.

Meade served as a parish priest in Frederick and Clarke Counties, Virginia, before being consecrated Assistant Bishop of Virginia in 1829, then succeeding to the diocesan office as Virginia’s second bishop in 1841. His episcopate was the longest of any nineteenth-century Virginia bishop and reshaped the diocese — most consequentially with the 1839 founding of 1200 North Quaker Lane Place 1200 North Quaker Lane The first high school in Virginia, founded 1839 by Bishop William Meade of the Episcopal Diocese on a 100-acre campus west of Old Town. First principal William Nelson Pendleton … on the western edge of Alexandria, the first high school in the Commonwealth and the institutional template for the diocese’s later schools (St. Agnes 1924, St. Stephen’s 1944).

Meade campaigned vigorously against dueling — at a moment when it remained legal in Virginia and common in Tidewater society — and helped pass the Code’s anti-dueling provisions of 1810. He was an early champion of Sunday schools and wrote Old Churches, Ministers and Families of Virginia (1857), a two-volume work still cited in Anglican-history scholarship.

His theology was Evangelical-Episcopal — emphasizing personal conversion, plain liturgy, and missionary expansion — and he opposed the Oxford Movement when it began to influence Virginia clergy in the 1840s and 50s.

Meade died at his home in Millwood, Virginia, on March 14, 1862, at the age of 72, with the Civil War in its first spring. He was buried at the Old Chapel cemetery in Clarke County.