St. Mary Help of Christians Church

About this property

St. Mary Help of Christians Church is a Catholic parish of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Charleston. The main parish church is at 138 Fairfield St. SE in Aiken, South Carolina. The campus also includes the historic 1905 church ("Old Saint Mary's") at the corner of Park Avenue and York Street, and Ste. Claire Chapel (1880), which sits to the left of the historic church. These two church buildings are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In February 1840, Count James Achille de Caradeuc, a French army engineer purchased over 400 acres of land about five miles east of Aiken, near the present day community of Montmorenci. Priests from the missions of the area would stay at his estate and celebrate Mass from time to time. Anticipating the growth of the Catholic population in the nearby, still newly established town of Aiken, Bishop Ignatius A. Reynolds purchased a tract of land on the corner of Park Ave. and York St., thereby establishing the parish on June 29, 1853, the Solemnity of Sts. Peter and Paul. The first parish church was constructed on this corner in 1867. This small building was destroyed by a tornado in 1878. Ste Claire Chapel is a brick Gothic Revival chapel in the Early English Style that was constructed in 1879-1880. A winter resident of Aiken, Celestine E. Eustis aunt of Louise Eustis Hitchcock (wife of Thomas Hitchcock, one of the founding families of the Aiken Winter Colony), helped with funds to build a new church. Local tradition says that it was designed by James Renwick Jr., who designed St. Patrick's Cathedral and the Smithsonian Institution Building. This is plausible because Miss Eustis was the aunt of W.W. Corcoran's grandchildren, and Renwick had designed buildings for Corcoran in Washington, D.C. The chapel has a steeply pitched gabled, slate roof. It has a rosewood altar. It has three stained glass windows done by Nicolas Lorin in Chartres, France, who had also produced St. Patrick's Founder's Window that had been designed by Renwick. == The Historic Church - "Old Saint Mary's" (1905) == The 1905 church was built to replace the much smaller Ste Claire Chapel in response to a growing Catholic population. The church seats 280 people and is designed by McMurphy & Story in Augusta in the late Gothic Revival style with elements of the Decorated Gothic style. It has a steeply pitched roof and rectangular nave. The facade has a gabled central section flanked by two towers. One tower has a pitched roof. The other has a 120' tall, white/silver spire with a gold cross. The rectangular nave has a timbered, hammer beam ceiling. In the 1950s stained glass windows were added depicting scenes from the life of the Blessed Virgin Mary.

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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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