American soldiers reportedly slaughtered animals in the courtyard and used the communion table as a chopping block, although its surface was later restored.

By the War of 1812, the church had fallen into ruin and an "American patrol" used the baptismal font as a drinking bowl, so that it was carried away and found on a nearby farm.

In 1838, when bishop William Meade visited, the church showed evidence of few repairs although the original roof may have been present.

[14] It is the second church on this site; the earlier building was a wooden structure of "oak timbers, sheathed with clapboards.".

[15] Curiously, parts of the wooden structure, including a corner post inside the east gable and a portion of a beam were found embedded in the walls.

It has been suggested with no real proof that the brick walls were erected around the frame of the earlier wooden one, essentially encasing it.

A brief outline shows this: It is the only remaining colonial church in Cople Parish and Westmoreland County.

[15] Yeocomico is a room church that shows a combination of features from the Virginia Gothic tradition, as in Newport Parish and St. Peter's, New Kent County, combined with the emerging Classical style of the Virginia church of the eighteenth century.

[15] The chancel and west walls of the east-west wing that form the main body of the church and comprise its earliest sections differ significantly in their dimensions.

[14] The brickwork is typical of Virginia colonial churches in being laid with a water table, a section standing on the foundation, a brick's length wider than the walls that are nineteen inches thick.

The transition from the water table to the walls is made with an ovolo, a convex ¼ round, molded brick.

The brick arch is obviously a replacement, but the wooden door trim consisting of two vertical frames surmounted by a horizontal board bearing a chamfer and lamb's tongue molding may be of colonial age.

The wooden door frame consists of three sets of flat boards, becoming progressively narrower toward the doorway.

[22] The original window openings are difficult to ascertain due to successive and significant reworkings of the walls since 1900.

[23] The general form most likely follows that of St. Peter's Church in New Kent county that has diamond-shaped leaded panes set in square casement windows, though, these too are reproductions from fragments discovered on the site.

They consist of two rectangular, facing guillotine sashed windows covered by heavy wooden shutters painted dark green and fixed with wrought iron H or H-L hinges.

On either side of the window opening are simple rectangular tablets bearing on the left The Lord's Prayer above the Apostles' Creed and on the right Exodus XX (The Ten Commandments) under which is printed the Summary of the Law.

All of this stands to the west side of the south window on a raised platform but, unlike the chancel, has no separating rail.

[11] The rest of the ground level of the church is taken up by rows of slip pews facing south in what is essentially a nave area.

The present brick floors are clearly not of colonial age as is the case with the raised platforms for the chancel and pulpit.

The tie beams, that are marked with a lamb's tongue and chamfer, are original while the roof trusses were replaced in the 1820s.

Hence, regulations were passed that the table in each church must be located on the east wall and that a protective rail be erected around it.

Upton notes that it closely resembles baptismal bowls in books of standardized fonts common in England at the time.

Five colonial grave markers are spaced throughout the churchyard: in 1963, three were illegible and two were table tombs moved from "Wilmington" home of the Newton family about a mile and a half west of the church.

[8] Colonial churches only sporadically had graveyards such as this one enclosed by walls as most parishioners tended to inter their dead on their own plantations or farms.

[32] The quaintness of this edifice derives not only from the Tudor swag (kicked gables) at the eaves, the south porch, the porch arches, and wicket door, but also from fanciful embellishments to the building in the form of unique door pilasters and brick plaques.

As already mentioned, the porch gable contains glazed headers in a diamond shape (diapering) and a glazed header barge line (a diagonal line of bricks following the barge boards on the gable), but these embellishments are unevenly spaced so that the diamond is clearly off-center (see porch picture in gallery).

earlier churches" toward a "baroque feeling for masses and complex shapes", with unique characteristics such as the southwest porch and the pronounced kicked eaves derived from English architectural traditions.

[23] Rawlings states: "While the greater part of the church, of course, owes a great deal to both the late Gothic and early Classical manners of building, much of it also derives from the naïve and primitive skills and ways of its early artificers, who built an ornamented their church in much the same natural and God-fearing way ... Yeocomico today is still a relatively a remote spot that is blessedly not too much overcome by latter day sophistication.

[33] "When it is said that Yeocomico Church is fascinating, quaint, and artless beyond compare, it must also be said that it is equally perplexing, particularly as to its original shape and masonry"[34]