St. Mark's Episcopal Church
(ca. 1887)
Mecklenburg County’s second oldest Episcopal congregation worships in the 1887 St. Mark's Episcopal Church building.
8600 Mt. Holly-Huntersville Road, Huntersville, NC 28078
The St. Mark's Episcopal Church building is the home of Mecklenburg County’s second oldest Episcopal congregation. Discontent with the Presbyterian teachings of the nearby Hopewell church, Long Creek community farmer Columbus W. McCoy began attending services at St. Peter's Episcopal Church in Charlotte, established in 1834 as the area’s first Episcopal congregation. In 1883, McCoy invited Reverend Joseph Blount Cheshire, Jr., St. Peter’s rector and the subsequent bishop of the North Carolina diocese, to come preach to a gathering in Long Creek. Impressed with the size and attentiveness of the local residents who gathered at the Beech Cliff School House on November 18, 1883, to hear him preach, Cheshire made several return visits to hold services in the community.
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Interest and attendance continued to grow. With the guidance of Cheshire and Reverend Edwin A. Osborne, an acquaintance of McCoy's who had left the Hopewell church to study for the Episcopalian ministry, McCoy and fifteen other Long Creek residents petitioned Raleigh’s Reverend Theodore B. Lyman, then the bishop of the North Carolina diocese, to establish a new Episcopalian congregation in Huntersville. Lyman did so on October 25, 1884, appointing Reverend Osborne as first rector of the new congregation. At the suggestion of Cheshire and Osborne, the congregation chose the name St. Mark's because of the Biblical association of St. Mark and St. Peter as companions, reflecting the like association between the two Mecklenburg congregations. Osborne, a Civil War veteran and lawyer before entering the ministry, served the St. Mark’s congregation from 1885 to 1898, 1900 to 1904, and 1906 to 1910. He also established the Thompson Orphanage and Training Institution in Charlotte in 1887, serving as its superintendent for ten years.
In February 1885, just four months after St. Mark’s was started, the congregation purchased property from congregation members Robert D. Whitley (owner of Whitley's Mill on Long Creek) and his wife Martha (sister of Columbus McCoy) and Benjamin and Dovey Houston for the construction of a house of worship. The congregation contracted Joseph Free Grady, Sr. – a prominent local builder responsible for some of the first homes constructed in Charlotte’s Dilworth neighborhood – in 1886 to construct the church for $770. John Ellis McAuley crafted bricks for the church using clay gathered from the creek at the bottom of the hill from the construction site. Himself a carpenter, McAuley later built the church’s rectory in about 1897. The church building is an excellent local example of the "English country Gothic" architectural style long associated with the Episcopal Church in America as that was the chief ecclesiastical style in England when King Henry VIII created the denomination. Reverend Osborne conducted the first service in the new church on March 27, 1887.