Old Christ Church: Unchanged Since Before the Revolution

A short distance from the highway, hidden behind a stand of old trees, stands a wooden church that has never been plumbed or wired. Old Christ Church in Laurel, Delaware was completed in seventeen seventy-two, and it remains one of the most pristine pre-Revolutionary church interiors in the United States.

The church was built as a Chapel of Ease for Stepney Parish in Maryland, serving Anglican congregants on the Delaware side of the line who found the journey to the parent church across the border too long. Builder Robert Houston completed the frame structure in seventeen seventy-two. The building measures forty by sixty feet, unusually generous for a rural chapel of its era, and its Georgian ecclesiastical design was adapted from the broader Anglican building tradition then sweeping the Atlantic coast.

What makes Old Christ Church exceptional is precisely what has not happened to it. Of the roughly dozen pre-Revolutionary churches still standing along the Atlantic coast in their original condition, this is among the best preserved. The box pews, where families once rented their own enclosed bench space and brought foot warmers on cold mornings, are intact. There is no electric lighting and no plumbing.

The church stood through the Revolution largely untouched, though the war disrupted Anglican worship throughout the colonies, the Church of England being identified, understandably, with the Crown. After independence, Anglican churches in America reorganized as the Episcopal Church, and Old Christ Church eventually remained tied to Saint Philip's Episcopal Church in Laurel, formed in eighteen thirty-four with help from the old parish.

Added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen seventy-two, exactly two hundred years after its completion, the building rewards a short detour. Inside, this is not a restoration. It is the thing itself.