"Sacred to the memory of the Rev. JOHN JONES SPOONER, Rector of the Church in Elizabeth City County; who departed this life September 15, 1799, aged forty-two years."
And then to the right of the door entering from the east, another bearing the following:
"Departed this life, January 17, 1806, the Rev. BENJAMIN BROWN, Rector of Elizabeth City Parish, aged thirty-nine years."
On November 17, 1806, the vestry elected the Rev. Robert Seymour Sims, and August 11, 1810, they elected the Rev. George Holson. During the last war with Great Britain (1813), Hampton was sacked, its inhabitants pillaged--one of its aged citizens sick and infirm, wantonly murdered in the arms of his wife--and other crimes committed by hireling soldiers, and by brutalized officers, over which the chaste historian must draw a veil. The church of God itself was not spared during the saturnalia of lust and violence. His temple was profaned, and His altars desecrated. What British ruthlessness had left scathed and prostrate, was soon looked upon with neglect. The moles and the bats held their revels undisturbed within its once hallowed courts, and the "obscene owl nestled and brought forth in the ark of the covenant." The church in which our fathers worshipped, stabled the horse and stalled the ox. The very tombs of the dead, sacred in all lands, became a slaughter ground of the butcher, and an arena for pugilistic contests. A few faithful ones wept when they remembered Zion, in her day of prosperity, and beheld her in her hour of homeless travail, and to their cry, "How long, oh Lord how long!" the following preamble, accompanying a subscription list, tells the story of her woes, and breathes the language of her returning hope:
"Whereas, from a variety of circumstances, the Episcopal Church in the town of Hampton, is in a state of dilapidation, and will ere long moulder into ruins, unless some friendly hand be extended to its relief, and in the opinion of the vestry, the only method that can be pursued to accomplish the laudable design of restoring it to the order in which our forefathers bequeathed it to their children, is to resort to subscription; and they do earnestly solicit pecuniary aid from all its friends in the full belief, that an appeal will not be made in vain. And hoping that God will put it into the hearts of the people to be benevolently disposed toward our long neglected Zion."