East Ave Tabernacle ARP Church
(ca. 1914)
The Great Aunt Stella Center was once the home of East Avenue Tabernacle A.R.P. Church, one of the city’s first A.R.P. congregations.
926 Elizabeth Ave, Charlotte, NC 28204
The former East Avenue Tabernacle A.R.P. Church is the only remaining structure associated with one of Charlotte’s earliest Associated Reformed Presbyterian congregations. Begun officially in 1898 in the basement of a First Ward home, the Tabernacle A.R.P. Baptist Church became only the third A.R.P. church in Charlotte (and the fourth in Mecklenburg County) during a most advantageous period in the city’s history. The economic prosperity and population boom of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the result of Charlotte’s emergence as a regionally important textile manufacturing and cotton trading center, helped the Tabernacle congregation quickly gain members and accumulate funds for a formal sanctuary. By the end of 1899, the church had begun construction of a brick Victorian church building at the intersection of Elizabeth Avenue and East Trade Street.
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That edifice served the growing congregation until a fire destroyed the building in the early 1910s. Under the leadership of Reverend W. W. Orr (1855-1928), former minister of Huntersville A.R.P. Church and founder of Huntersville’s first community school, the congregation quickly rebounded to construct the extant Second Ward Neoclassical structure. Completed in 1914, the new church featured a “Celtic cross” sanctuary, a central octagonal dome, an impressive portico supported by Corinthian columns, and large Italian stained-glass windows. The design was the work of the nationally recognized architect James Mackson McMichael (1870-1944), widely regarded as one of North Carolina’s leading church architects, who had only recently designed Neoclassical buildings for First Ward’s First Baptist Church (1908) and Little Rock A.M.E. Zion Church (1911). During his 50-year career, the Pennsylvania-born McMichael reportedly designed more than 900 churches, twenty-two of which are located in Charlotte.
Members of the Tabernacle congregation were so impressed with McMichael’s work that they commissioned him in 1925 to design a rear addition to the structure for the church’s educational center, kitchen, and offices. When Reverend Orr died in 1928 after twenty-eight years as minister of East Avenue Tabernacle, his son Reverend Ernest Neal Orr (1879-1971), himself a long-time member of the congregation, immediately assumed the responsibility of his father’s position. Ernest Orr served as minister until 1950, and was succeeded by Henry Erskine Pressley (1910-1998), who served East Avenue Tabernacle until 1980. Over time, as Charlotteans began to move to the suburbs, the once prolific congregation dwindled, dropping from a pre-WWII membership of 1,200 to just under 400 by the 1980s. In 1992, the church’s remaining members voted to build a new sanctuary in the suburbs. When that plan failed to materialize, the East Avenue Tabernacle congregation eventually merged with Craig Avenue A.R.P. Church to form Craig Tabernacle A.R.P. Church. In 1997, the former East Avenue Tabernacle Church building became the Great Aunt Stella Center, home of the Community Charter School and a variety of non-profit, ethnic, and cultural organizations.