St. Luke's Episcopal Church: Seven Hundred and Twenty-Eight Dollars and a London Window

In the Chunns Cove neighborhood on the eastern side of Asheville, tucked against the ridge where the land rises toward the Blue Ridge, there is a small wooden church that cost seven hundred and twenty-eight dollars to build and has been standing for more than a hundred and thirty years. That is not a typo. Seven hundred and twenty-eight dollars.

St. Luke's Episcopal Church was constructed in eighteen ninety-four by a congregation that had formed in this mountain cove under the ministry of the Reverend Jarvis Buxton, who had come to Asheville in eighteen forty-seven to serve Trinity Church and then set about organizing small outlying congregations in the hollows and coves that surrounded the city. Chunns Cove had its own Episcopal community by the mid-eighteen hundreds, but no building.

When the congregation finally built, they hired one of their own: E.J. Armstrong, a member of the church, designed the building in the Carpenter Gothic style, the tradition of wooden Gothic Revival churches popularized by architect Richard Upjohn in the mid-nineteenth century for rural American congregations that could not afford stone. The pointed arched windows, the steep gabled roof, the simple board-and-batten siding: all the essential vocabulary of Carpenter Gothic, executed at the smallest possible scale for under a thousand dollars.

The first service was held on September seventeenth, eighteen ninety-four.

In the nineteen forties, the Reverend James Sill added something extraordinary. He obtained stained-glass panels that had originally been installed in Saint Chrysostom's Chapel in New York City. The glass had been designed and manufactured in the late nineteenth century by Heaton, Butler and Bayne of London, one of the most celebrated stained-glass studios in the English-speaking world. So the little mountain church that cost less than a thousand dollars to build now holds windows made by the same firm that worked on Westminster Abbey and Saint Paul's Cathedral.

St. Luke's was added to the National Register of Historic Places in nineteen ninety-seven.