Sharon Lutheran Church and Cemetery, are situated on the edge of the tiny village of Ceres in Bland County, Virginia and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. The following excerpts from its nomination as submitted to the US Department of Interior, National Register of Historic Places, provide an overview of the historic site and its significance. For more information, read the full nomination, a copy of which is available in the "Downloads" feature of this website.

Like most of the German cemeteries of Southwest Virginia, Sharon Cemetery is set on a knoll amidst rolling farmlands. The present frame church probably dates from 1883, when it was built as a union church for the Presbyterians and Lutherans of Ceres. This church is four bays long, with round-arched, stained-glass windows; a square tower with a bell-cast pyramidal roof and cross finial projects from the center of the gable-end entrance facade. The exterior of Sharon Church has been covered with aluminum siding, but the interior remains as it was built. Golden-oak, Gothic-style pews are set in an arc, facing the oak Eastlake style rail and the shallow chancel. A gold-painted, Eastlake-style chandelier and an apparently locally made mid-19th-century table are among the other furnishings of interest.


Of principal interest, however, is the cemetery, which contains a significant collection of rare Germanic gravestones which are stylistically related to those found in the outlying churches of the Wythe County German settlements. Specifically, the stones here suggest that they were made by the same hand or hands that produced those a t Zion and Kimberling churches in Wythe County and Central Church, Burke's Garden, in Tazewell County. There are approximately 50 to 60 of these stones, in various states of preservation, and they comprise 15 to 25 percent of the t o t a l stones in the cemetery. These stones display characteristic features of traditional German stone carving in the area--they are very thick sandstone slabs, are decorated on both sides and often on their edges, and are often fancifully shaped, with multiple-lobed tops. Their inscriptions are normally framed with heavy raised moldings, and standard decorative motifs include six- and eight-petaled flowers, hearts, vines, and abstract geometrical shapes. The most striking and one of the best-preserved monuments in the cemetery is the HG stone.

Sharon Lutheran Church and Cemetery descend from the large-scale German settlement of Wythe County and more specifically from a union church established here in 1821. The cemetery is one of a handful of sites in Southwest Virginia where significant numbers of Germanic gravestones are preserved. The gravestones are especially important documents of the rich material folk culture of these settlers , because, unlike domestic examples, they are visible t o the public. The present church structure dates from 1883 and retains a handsome, little - altered, country-Gothic interior in the Eastlake manner. Germans first came to Wythe County in the late 18th century, settling at Wytheville and fanning out to the south and west of there. St. John's in Wytheville was their principal church, but soon smaller churches were set up in the outlying areas, including Zion (Crippled Creek) and Kimberling churches in Wythe County and Sharon Church. As in the case of Sharon Church, for which land was given by Jacob Groseclose, a Presbyterian, and Jacob Kimberling, a Lutheran, in 1817, often the tiny Lutheran congregations shared their buildings with German Reformed groups or even with non-German denominational groups like the Presbyterians and Methodists. A t Sharon, this arrangement continued for the rest of the 19th century. When the log church of 1821 was replaced by a brick church in 1856, it was still used both by the Lutherans and by the New School Presbyterians. Again, in 1883, when the present structure was erected, the' building remained a union church. It was only in 1911 that the Presbyterians built their own structure.

For the Lutherans, early pastors were George D. Flour (d. 1826) of St. John's Church in Wytheville and Nehemiah Bonham, who also served the Burke's Garden congregation. It is not surprising, therefore, that the stylistic ties among the gravestones of the three counties should be so close, given their identity of personnel. Sharon Lutherans were charter members of the Synod of Southwest Virginia, while her Presbyterians were organized in 1827 under the Abingdon Presbytery.