The Marble Church of Jasper

The building on your left is easy to miss if you're watching the light , but pull your eyes off the road for a moment. That white marble facade belongs to the First United Methodist Church of Jasper, and it is, by most architectural accounts, one of the finest Beaux-Arts buildings in the entire state of Alabama.

The congregation goes back to the eighteen twenties, when Jasper's founder, Dr. Edward Gordon Musgrove, donated land and logs for a combined church and school. The building you see today is their fifth home on this site, constructed between nineteen twelve and nineteen twenty-one. It was funded in large part by Lycurgus Breckenridge Musgrove, grandson of the founder, who matched every dollar donated by other members with two of his own. He also donated the white marble sheathing the exterior , Georgia marble , and paid for the stained glass dome inside.

That dome is worth understanding before you see it. Thirty-four feet across, it is assembled from one hundred nine sections containing more than thirty thousand individual pieces of art glass. The work was designed by A. Leyendecker and fabricated by the Kansas City Stained Glass Company at an original cost of ten thousand dollars. Angels and cherubs float in a field of ethereal blue, ringed by geometric borders, all held in frames of dark Honduran mahogany.

The church was dedicated debt-free on November third, nineteen twenty-one, a source of local pride that got carved into institutional memory.

But the story that put this building in the history books came in September of nineteen forty. William Brockman Bankhead, Speaker of the United States House of Representatives, died in office. Bankhead was a Jasper man, and his funeral was held here. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt came from Washington to attend, along with much of the Cabinet, members of Congress, and a young senator from Missouri named Harry S. Truman. An estimated forty thousand people gathered in and around this church. Because Roosevelt could not climb stairs, workers built a special ramp from the street to the sanctuary entrance. Inside, a brass plaque now marks the exact pew where the President sat.

On the National Register of Historic Places since nineteen eighty-five, the church is open to visitors most weekdays. The dome alone makes it worth the stop.