By Jeff McCord
Nearly forty years after a devastating fire destroyed much of the written record of its past, members of the congregation of Saint Paul United Methodist Church (UMC) in Grant Park are making a renewed effort to collect and document its long and rich history.
Once the largest congregation in the former Methodist Episcopal South denomination, Saint Paul United Methodist has been a mainstay and a treasured part of the Grant Park community for generations. And now, the church is inviting the community to help by contributing any records, artifacts, or memories of Saint Paul that may exist outside the church.
“Saint Paul UMC has such a rich history in Grant Park and beyond,” said Rev. Cassie Rapko, the pastor at Saint Paul, “and we’re hoping to uncover more of that to understand where we came from and how it shapes who we are today.”
In recognition that the history of the church is also the story of her congregation and community, the recently initiated Saint Paul History Project is an effort to document not just the history of the building – which includes an 1887 bell in the bell tower and a circa 1885 John Brown pipe organ – but also the history of the Christian ministries undertaken throughout the years by a congregation seeking to meet the spiritual, physical, and individual needs of the community.
Saint Paul’s granite-block Romanesque sanctuary that sits at the corner of Grant and Sydney Streets is actually the “new” home of the congregation that was founded in 1867 as a Sunday School mission of Trinity Methodist Episcopal Church on Washington Street. In that year, Atlanta was under federal occupation after the Civil War and the cornerstone for the state capitol building would not be laid for another fourteen years.
Dedicated by Bishop Warren A. Candler on the first Sunday in January 1908, the new sanctuary was expanded with an attached Sunday School building in 1922. It was this building that caught fire in the early hours of October 19, 1985, resulting in a catastrophic loss. Fortunately, the sanctuary was saved by heroic City of Atlanta firefighters.
The 1980s were a dire time in Grant Park and other intown neighborhoods which were suffering from decades of disinvestment, white flight, and the destruction caused by interstate highway construction. The much-diminished Saint Paul congregation was facing a difficult decision to try to rebuild or to simply close the church, but the Grant Park neighborhood rallied around the church. A new Sunday School building was built and the ministry of the church continued against the odds.
Records and artifacts of the history of Saint Paul United Methodist that were not destroyed in the 1985 fire have, for years, been scattered throughout the church building in storage closets, filing cabinets and nooks and crannies without much organization. The Saint Paul History Project is an effort by church members to collect the scattered remnants and to gather additional information through research and documentation.
“We learn from our past every day,” said Rev. Rapko. “We learn and grow and get better, and at Saint Paul we’re not content to just celebrate the past but we’re excited to also build a more informed legacy into the future.”
Members of the community are encouraged to contact the church office at office@stpaulgrantpark.org if they have any photos, documents, or memories of Saint Paul UMC to share.
