Christ Church, Episcopal, Church Hill, Jefferson County – (1857-58) (National Register). Christ Church is the “cradle of Episcopacy in Mississippi” as the congregation built the first Christ Church on Church Hill around 1820. The current Christ Church is the third Christ Church on Church Hill. Obscure Natchez architect/lawyer J. Edward Smith designed Christ Church with N. L. Carpenter constructing the church in 1857 and 1858. Smith designed perhaps the purest expression of Gothic Revival architecture in antebellum Mississippi. The National Register nomination form states, “Christ Church is one of the few Gothic Revival buildings in the state having a functional hammer-beam roof. This late-medieval construction form is also ‘honestly’ expressed on the exterior. Christ Church is built of brick, stuccoed and scored to imitate ashlar masonry…The integrity of the original structure and decorative fabric of Christ Church is remarkable…Pews, chairs, and the marble font are also original furnishings. Although inoperative for many years, the original pipe organ, reported to be of Scottish manufacture, remains in place. Alterations to the exterior structure have been limited to the removal of the paired chimneys, which served an original furnace below the nave, and the disappearance of all corbels from which the drip stones and hammer-beam representations sprang.”
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