America’s first Christmas tree

Any day now, I, along with a number of my children and grandchildren, will embark on an annual pilgrimage.

It’s a Christmas tradition still practiced by many in Virginia. We will avoid the big box stores and corner lots and make our way down a narrow dirt road somewhere here in the Shenandoah Valley to a Christmas tree farm. There, we will scatter to scout out a perfect specimen.

After a lengthy debate and judging contest, I will cut down our tree. Hopefully, a fresh snow will blanket the ground, adding to the ambience of the occasion. Then we’ll go back home for some apple cider (just a tad hard) and the trimming of the tree to complete our day.

Of course, this tradition is not exclusive to Virginia, though we Virginians are able to claim proudly the Christmas tree’s origin here in America. The custom’s progenitor was Charles Frederick Ernest Minnigerode (1814-1894).

Minnigerode is more widely known as rector of the “Church of the Confederacy” — St. Paul’s Episcopal Church in Richmond, where he ministered for 33 years and where both Gen. Robert E. Lee and Confederate President Jefferson Davis worshipped.

Born in Germany, young Minnigerode was thoroughly educated in the classics and confirmed to the Lutheran Church at the age of 15.

Entering the University of Giessen to study law in 1832, the young man soon became embroiled in the raging political debates that engulfed Germany at that time. Things came to a head in 1834. Minnigerode, who wanted to help establish a democratic Germany, was accused of being a “revolutionary,” arrested and thrown into prison. For the next four years, he languished in various prisons, even spending some of that time in ancient German dungeons.

For most of the time Minnigerode was imprisoned, he was allowed only one book — the Bible. Tradition has it that he read it through eight times — memorizing much of what he read during his lonely hours of solitude. One biographer wrote, “He would reflect on it, write essays on it in his mind … he laid it down and put it in his heart as God’s book, as divine.”

This prison experience with “God’s book” would serve him well in his future role ministering to dejected Richmonders, who, like Minnigerode, also would know lonely hours and experience their own form of imprisonment.

Eventually, Minnigerode became ill from exposure in the dank prisons, and jail officials worried that he might die. Not wanting that responsibility, they put him under house arrest and released him to the care of his brother and father.

Finally freed from house arrest in 1839, Minnigerode concluded he would always be under suspicion in Germany. Some rumors persist that the young German also was involved in a duel and forced to flee his homeland.

Whatever the circumstances, Charles Minnigerode decided he could not remain in Germany and sailed to America, arriving in Philadelphia in December 1839. The 10-week ocean voyage evidently had improved his health. One writer noted that he landed “well and free for the first time in more than four years.”

Learning to speak English fluently in just three months, Minnigerode soon found himself teaching Greek, Latin and Hebrew as well as German. This would prove to be only temporary, however. Reading of a call in a newspaper for a position teaching ancient languages at the College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, Minnigerode applied. Initially facing strong opposition as a “foreigner,” the young scholar had to compete against 30 other well-qualified applicants. George Blow, a member of William and Mary’s Board of Visitors, later wrote:

“Testimonials of about thirty candidates were examined. … The overwhelming certificates, letters of recommendation and evidences of qualification, of splendid attainments and other requisites for a professor, were so overpowering, that it left not a doubt or hesitancy in the minds of the visitors as to a choice, and on the first ballot Minnigerode was elected. … He is one of the best educated men in this country, and unsurpassed as a Classicist, writing Hebrew, Greek, & Latin with perfect ease & elegance.”

And so he moved to Williamsburg in 1842. There professor Minnigerode soon met Judge Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, who was a professor of law at William and Mary, and the two men soon became friends. That same Christmas, Tucker invited his new friend to share the holiday with his family at Williamsburg’s famous St. George Tucker House.

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