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It is remarkable how many books by Presbyterians were among the first to the published in this or that early American locale. We have shared some examples of this previously. Today’s query: what was the first book published in West Virginia?
Answer: The first book published in what is now West Virginia (which seceded from Virginia in 1863) is Moses Hoge’s Christian Panoply; Containing an Apology for the Bible in a Series of Letters Addressed to Thomas Paine (1797), and it was published in Shepherdstown. A tiny handful of pamphlets and broadsides were printed in 1791 and 1796, but Christian Panoply was the first book published in the territory of West Virginia.
Christian Panoply is a response to Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. The work essentially consists of three parts: 1) Richard Watson’s letters titled Apology for the Bible and his Address to Scoffers at Religion; 2) William Paley’s The Authenticity of the Books of the New Testament (extracted from his A View of the Evidences of Christianity); and 3) Hoge’s The Sophist Unmasked (under Hoge’s pseudonym, Philobiblius).
We added this work to Log College Press last year, and it represents another Presbyterian landmark in the history of American literature. Students of church history can bookmark this West Virginia milestone for further study here.
