The stately Gothic church on Washington Street in Lexington known today as Grace Episcopal Church was completed in 1883. But before that familiar landmark was built, area Episcopalians, who were a minority, far behind Presbyterians in numbers and influence, had a more modest home on the same site.
The late George Mercer Brooke III tells the story of that early Grace Church — both the congregation and the building — in a new “Rockbridge Epilogue.” Colonel Brooke, a 1967 graduate and a professor of history at Virginia Military Institute from 2005 to 2012, was a senior warden and two-term vestryman at the church. He died in 2018.
The early church building was initiated by the pastor, William Bryant, and the bishop of Virginia, Williams Meade, and was dedicated in 1844. No contemporary images of it are known, but in 1929 Ellen Graham Anderson, a well-known Lexington artist and church member, created a likeness by interviewing two parishioners who had attended it decades earlier. Subsequent research, published in Historic Lexington Foundation’s definitive book “Architecture of Historic Lexington” (1977), confirmed the accuracy of Anderson’s conjectural drawing.
Brooke’s article also briefly describes the replacement of the old church by the present, much larger building, after the congregation had become solidly entrenched in the religious, educational and civic culture of Rockbridge. That congregation renamed itself to honor Robert E. Lee, its best-known communicant, in 1903, reverting to a version of the original name in 2017.
Col. Brooke’s early Grace Church story is available at www.HistoricRockbridge. org. It is the 58th article in the 10-year-old online journal, which is endorsed by both HLF and the Rockbridge Historical Society.
ABOVE, William Meade, bishop of Virginia in 1842, spearheaded the effort to build an Episcopal church building in Lexington. (photo courtesy of Project Canterbury) AT RIGHT, the “new” Grace Church, completed in 1883, replaced the smaller original church.
THIS DRAWING of the original Grace Church was done in 1929 by Ellen Graham Anderson, based on recollections of parishioners of the 1844 building. (courtesy of the Rockbridge Historical Society)
