The Reverend Dr. Lonnie H. Lee is a graduate of the University of Kansas, Princeton Theological Seminary, and Austin Presbyterian Theological Seminary who now resides in Leawood, Kansas. Over four decades of pastoral ministry Dr. Lee served four Presbyterian congregations in Oklahoma, Texas, and Illinois.
His longstanding interest in Post-Reformation church history has inspired his in-depth study of the seventeenth-century Huguenot diaspora through extensive research in Virginia, Great Britain, and France. His article, "The Transatlantic Legacy of the Protestant Church of Cozes," was published in Great Britain in 2019 by The Huguenot Society Journal. His book, A Brief History of Belle Isle Plantation, Lancaster County, Virginia, 1650-1782, was published by Heritage Books in 2020. Another article, "Huguenot-Anglicans in Seventeenth-Century Virginia," appeared in the journal, Anglican and Episcopal History, in September 2022. Dr. Lee's most recent book, The Huguenot-Anglican Refuge in Virginia: Empire, Land, and Religion in the Rappahannock Region, was released in 2023 by Lexington Books and Fortress Academic, as part of their Anglican Studies Series. The book was reviewed in Virginia Magazine for History and Biography (2024), Vol. 132, No. 2, The Huguenot Society Journal (2024), Vol. 37, published by the Huguenot Society of Great Britain and Ireland, and Journal of Southern History (2025), Vol. 91, No. 1, published by the Southern Historical Association. It was named by the National Huguenot Society in the United States as the best work of Huguenot scholarship for 2023.
The Huguenot-Anglican Refuge in Virginia
The Huguenot-Anglican Refuge in Virginia is the history of a Huguenot emigrant community established in eight counties along the Rappahannock River of Virginia in 1687, with the arrival of an Anglican-ordained Huguenot minister from Cozes, France named John Bertrand. This Huguenot community, effectively hidden to researchers for more than 300 years, comes to life through the examination of county court records cross-referenced with French Protestant records in England and France. The 261 households and fifty-three indentured servants documented in this study, including a significant group from Bertrand’s hometown of Cozes, comprise a large Huguenot migration to English America and the only one to fully embrace Anglicanism from its inception. In July 1687 a French exile named Durand de Dauphiné published a tract at The Hague outlining the pattern and geography of this migration. The tract included a short list of inducements Virginia officials were offering to attract Huguenot settlers to Rappahannock County. These included access to French preaching by a Huguenot minister who would also serve an established Anglican parish, and the availability of inexpensive land. John Bertrand was the first of five French exile ministers performing this dual track ministry in the Rappahannock region between 1687 and 1767.
What academic journals are saying about The Huguenot-Anglican Refuge in Virginia
The Huguenot Society Journal of Great Britain and Ireland
“This well-researched, and engagingly written book is a valuable contribution for family historians, historians of colonial British America, and Virginia in particular, and students of the complicated and shifting religious policies of late Stuart England.”
Virginia Magazine of History and Biography
“In exploring the Huguenot migration to the Rappahannock area, Lonnie H. Lee deepens our understanding of the settlement and religion of early Virginia, all within the context of European politics and English imperialistic ambitions.”
Journal of Southern History
”In this remarkable study built on painstaking research into local records … Lonnie H. Lee reconstructs what may have been the largest Huguenot community in British North America. Lee’s richly documented account is a valuable contribution to Virginia social and religious history, showing it to be less English and Anglican than is usually thought.”
A Brief History of Belle Isle Plantation
This brief history identifies and interprets the rich cache of surviving archival and primary records relating to the Virginia colonial plantation that came to be called Belle Isle. After a long history as a Native American settlement visited by Captain John Smith in 1607 and 1608, this Rappahannock River plantation was first patented by Thomas Powell (d. 1670) as English settlers were pouring into this part of Virginia in 1650. In 1692, a Huguenot-Anglican immigrant clergyman named John Bertrand (c. 1651-1701) purchased this 500-acre plantation that he later enlarged to 924 acres.
The abundant documentary evidence for the Belle Isle plantation is enhanced by archeological studies of the site and its preservation by the Commonwealth of Virginia. In transactions consummated in 1992 and 2015, Virginia purchased virtually all of the land contained in the 924-acre Belle Isle patent John Bertrand received from the Northern Neck Proprietary in 1698. From these acquisitions the Commonwealth has created Belle Isle State Park.
A Brief History of Belle Isle Plantation has a chapter on each of the patent holders of the plantation during the colonial period, including the French merchant widow of John Bertrand -- Charlotte Jolly Bertrand (1659-1721). The annotated index of 434 names has 191 entries for persons who lived on the plantation during the colonial period (of whom seventeen were indentured servants and more than 100 were enslaved African Virginians). Facsimile reprints of original documents and maps, a bibliography, and two appendices (a plantation timeline and eight family trees researched in Virginia and western France) add to the value of this work.