for the Black neighborhoods that surrounded it. By 1840 the congregation included 4 Black lay preachers and 10 Black class leaders of the religious classes in the church. The church also held secular classes to teach basic literacy skills: reading, writing, arithmetic. They had a choir and a missionary society. The church was doing well enough financially that a parish house two doors down from the church was purchased in 1841. A single-story Lecture Room was built in the yard behind the church as an additional gathering space. This Black Methodist community of faith offered a spiritual, physical and emotional anchor for the surrounding Black neighborhoods of ‘the Bottoms’ and ‘Hayti’. During these first decades, the membership of Davis Chapel grew to about 700, with many members boating across the Potomac from Maryland. Having been ceded to the District of Columbia in 1801, the town of Alexandria offered a relatively secure place for Blacks and a refuge for runaway enslaved people under the less restrictive laws of the district. Retrocession and Church Split over Slavery Alexandria was retroceded to Virginia in 1846 and the town came under the more restrictive Virginia state laws concerning African Americans. One Virginia law at that time prohibited five or more African Americans from gathering together without oversight of a white person, another law prohibited the education of Black Americans. Due to these new restrictions, many activities at Davis Chapel were forced to close at this time. Racial tensions also affected the leadership of the church. In 1845 the Methodist Episcopal Church split over the issue of slavery; the southern conferences supporting slavery formed a new General Conference, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. The Rev. Davis, who had been instrumental in the formation of Davis Chapel, chose to align himself with the southern conferences. In response, Davis Chapel decided to change its name to Roberts Chapel to honor Bishop Robert Richford Roberts, a distinguished leader in the Methodist Episcopal Church who had died in 1843. Over the next decade, the nation marched inexorably into the crisis of the Civil War. Civil War in Alexandria Federal troops occupied Alexandria at the start of the Civil War in 1861, making the restrictive Virginia laws concerning African Americans mute. Activities of the church picked up again under the jurisdiction of the Union troops. Roberts Memorial Chapel was able to re-open its school in 1862, and by 1864 the