Chapel of the Cross

About this property

Chapel of the Cross is a parish of the Episcopal Church of the United States in Chapel Hill in the Diocese of North Carolina. It is the spiritual home to more than 1,600 communicants, including numerous students studying at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. The Church of England was established in Chapel Hill in 1752 when a chapel of ease was built at an important hilltop crossroads in the southern part of Orange County to spare remote parishioners a journey to the church in Hillsborough. The small log building, known as New Hope Chapel, stood where the Carolina Inn is now but disappeared during the American Revolution. The settlement on New Hope Chapel Hill remained, the University of North Carolina was founded in 1795, and traveling clergy visited, but a permanent Episcopal congregation did not form again for half a century. In May 1842, the Rev. William Mercer Green, a Professor of Belles Lettres at the University of North Carolina, presided over the organization of the Church of the Atonement, an Episcopal parish with fifteen communicants and no church building. The growing congregation worshiped in one another's homes for five years as work on their little church went slowly, using handmade bricks fired in kilns on the Rev. Green's property. On October 19, 1848, Bishop Levi Silliman Ives consecrated the new church – complete with a wooden gallery for slaves – “The Chapel of the Holy Cross.” He accurately described the scale of the building by calling it a chapel, but declared, “We’ll name it for the deed and not the doctrine.” The parish had twenty-two communicants, five of whom were University students. The Gothic Revival style church was designed by architect Thomas U. Walter. The red brick church has a gable roof and features a crenellated entrance tower and lancet windows. The original church was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1972. It is located in the Chapel Hill Historic District. By 1921 the parish had outgrown its first church. The Vestry, under the leadership of the Rev. Alfred Lawrence (rector 1921–1944) asked the distinguished church architect Hobart B. Upjohn to design a new building to be connected to “the old chapel” by a cloister. Major funding for the church was provided by a gift from the Durham mill owner and philanthropist William A. Erwin in memory of his grandfather, William Rainey Holt, a classmate of William Mercer Green in the class of 1818. The new building was consecrated on May 14, 1925. The Chapel of the Cross has not been untouched by the moral and political turmoil of the twentieth century. The Rev. David Yates (rector 1945–1959) insisted that a Christian community was obligated to pray for the enemy and respect the rights of conscientious objectors, however difficult, during World War II. He ensured that black people were welcomed in the parish, long before most Southern institutions were integrated. Later, on February 13, 1977, the Rev. Dr. Pauli Murray, the first black woman ordained to the Episcopal priesthood, celebrated her first Eucharist and also became the first woman to celebrate the Eucharist at The Chapel of the Cross. She presided in the same chapel where her grandmother, Cornelia, a slave child belonging to Mary Ruffin Smith, was baptized in 1854.

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Property data from the National Register of Historic Places, National Park Service (public domain).

Description adapted from Wikipedia under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

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