MANASSAS, Va. — The cannonball is no longer lodged behind the pulpit. The floorboards are no longer stained with blood.
But Sudley Church, which sits on a Northern Virginia hillside in Manassas National Battlefield Park, still defines itself by the role its parishioners played amid some of the most brutal days of the Civil War.
Now its pastor, Bass Mitchell, worries that protecting the battlefield’s history will destroy his congregation’s future.
That’s because the church lies alongside a road, once a simple dirt path, that as Northern Virginia has grown has become a busy commuter route. Dump trucks thunder past the weathered split-rail fences that line the fields of the Manassas battlefield, and at rush hour, traffic inches along.
To protect the historic park, the National Park Service would like to shut down the stretch of Route 234 in the battlefield. ‘‘We have been working literally for decades to find solutions to get traffic down,’’ said Ed Clark, the superintendent of the park. ‘‘It’s hallowed ground, a place for contemplation, understanding history. Fighting traffic and trucks is not exactly the way to facilitate that.’’
But that steady stream of passersby helps keep the church viable, Mitchell said. ‘‘If they close this road to through traffic,’’ he said, ‘‘we would become invisible.’’
Besides, he added, if the ultimate goal is historic preservation, ‘‘we’ve been here longer than the battlefield has.’’
‘‘We’re proud of our history,’’ he said. ‘‘But we don’t want to become a museum.’’
The road debate is one of many local skirmishes over the proposed Bi-County Parkway, which would cut a north-south path through Prince William and Loudoun counties and has whipped up intense debate over how best to manage the rapid growth in Northern Virginia.
Clark agreed to support the parkway plan if that meant that Route 234, long known as Sudley Road, would no longer be a commuter artery running through the park. The Bi-County Parkway provides an opportunity — one that he says is increasingly rare as development continues to crowd around the park — to shut down a major part of the problem.
But this fight is not so much about roads as it is about history and how to preserve it.
Both battles of Manassas were defining moments of the Civil War. With the country so politically polarized, Clark said, the lessons of history — both the fight and the reconciliation — are particularly resonant.
‘‘His mission is to save the battlefield,’’ Mitchell said of Clark. ‘‘But my mission is to save the church. And if he gets what he wants, we’re going to be a casualty.’’
The original church was built in the 19th century. The current wooden church, the third built on the site, has about 700 members, drawing 150 or so to services on Sundays.
One of the many stories connected with the congregation goes something like this:
On a hot Sunday in July 1861, a young Union soldier from New Hampshire named John Rice was shot and carried by comrades toward the church, which doctors had turned into a field hospital, throwing pews outside and using the Communion table for surgeries. But the soldiers left Rice unconscious next to a fence when Confederate forces attacked, and they fled.
Rice was not dead, even though a musket ball had sliced through his lungs. A Sudley farmer, Amos Benson, and his wife found him days after the battle and got help for him.
Sudley Church was at the heart of the second, and even bloodier, battle of Manassas — another turning point in the war. It was badly damaged in the fighting, including by a cannonball that smashed into the wall behind the pulpit.
After the war, parishioners built a simple wooden-frame building on the same site. The church would be rebuilt again after a lightning strike in 1918.
Twenty-five years after the first battle, Rice returned to Sudley to find the Bensons, if he could, and thank them.
When Rice kept pressing them, Benson told him that their poor farming congregation still shouldered a $200 debt and said a small contribution toward the rebuilding cost would be appreciated.
Rice wrote his story for his hometown newspaper, with a plea: ‘‘Let us raise the debt on a little southern church.’’ Within four days, readers in Massachusetts, including Union veterans, contributed so much that he sent $235 to the Bensons for Sudley Church.