Saint James Episcopal Chapel – 1876
St. James Episcopal Chapel occupies one of Lake City’s oldest surviving frame structures, a carpenter ship with vertical board and bat siding which was built in 1875 by a building and contracting firm owned by H.E. Turner and J.B. Lyons. Turner & Lyons specialized in large-scale industrial construction and in 1876 were the contractors on 17 stout log and timber bridges which were built across Henson Creek from Lake City to Alpine Gulch. The enterprising contractors are perhaps best known, however, for erecting the immense six-story concentrator at the Crooke Smelter above Lake City in 1876.
Turner & Lyons had vacated their Lake City carpentry shop and office late in 187 and the building was briefly used as a one room school by Hinsdale County School District, making this chapel not only one of the oldest buildings in the Lake City Historic District but also the oldest surviving school building in the town.
The structure is most closely associated with the Episcopal Church and has been continually occupied as a chapel by St. James Parish since it was acquired by the congregation in March 1877. As the first Episcopal Church on Colorado’s Western Slope, the parish was officially formed in 1876 through the support of Episcopal Bishop John Franklin Spaulding who visited Lake City in 1876 and 1877 with Rev. C.M. Hoge and Rev. Duncan Converse.
Local founders of St. James Parish were prominent town businessmen, including founder Enos T. Hotchkis, mining engineer T.W.M. Draper, newspaper editor H.C. Olney, and land office proprietor C.B. Hickman. Until moving into this building in 1877, church members held worship services in a business building, Kostitch Hall, in downtown Lake City.
The fledging congregation relied on lay readers in its early years, Col. John H. Simmons filling the role for the first years and receiving an enthusiastic appraisal from a visiting eastern journalist in June 1877. “At the Episcopal Church on Sunday eving, I heard a fine sermon of Charles Kingsley’s read by a layman, there being no clergyman to the congregation. So, depending entirely on their own resources for church service, they were better off as the sermon goes than any church in Philadelphia…”
The appearance of St. James Chapel remained carpentry shop-like until a major remodeling in 1892 which transformed the building to its present appearance with the addition of white-painted exterior clapboard, as well as raising the ceiling 4’ for better ventilation and acoustics.
“The walls have been newly papered with paper of a sage-green hue, topped with a handsome border,” the Lake City PHONGRAPH newspaper wrote in 1892, “new curtains shade the windows and a half dozen electric bulbs hang suspended at intervals from the ceiling.”
Interior furnishings of St. James Episcopal have remained remarkably authentic, the chancel and rail, altar and lectern all dating to 1877. The original pump organ remained in place until 1910 when the present church organ, an Estey reed organ, took its place.
INSET:
Lake City pioneer Henry A. Avery, a long-time member of St. James Episcopal Chapel, posed outside the church building with his 1919 Model T Ford c. 1920, above. Avery’s twin daughters, Charlotte and Helen, were married in a double wedding in the chapel in 1917.
The interior of St. James Episcopal reflects its pioneer heritage as the oldest Episcopal Church on Colorado’s Western Slope with locally manufactured pine pews, railing, altar, and lectern, all of which date to the late 1870’s and are still in use today.
