Jim Crow and the Building of the New Christ Church

For the first sixty years of its existence, from 1830 to 1890, Christ Church occupied a fairly modest structure at the corner of Spring and High Streets (now Church Street and 6th Avenue). Some additional pews had been added in the late 1840s to accommodate the growing congregation, but by the mid-1880s, the vestry decided to purchase land at the northwest corner of Broad and McLemore Streets (now Broadway and 9th Avenue) for a new, larger building. They commissioned the New York architect Francis H. Kimball to design a chapel, which was to be built first, and a church that would be roughly double the size of the old one. The chapel was completed in 1888, but cost overruns made parish leaders hesitant about continuing with the construction of the church. They had budgeted $65,000 for both, with the chapel estimated at $15,000; the finished chapel cost twice that. The foundations for the new church were nonetheless dug in 1890. Despite continued hesitation, the cornerstone was eventually laid on September 7, 1892, with the first service held in the new church on December 16, 1894. At the consecration ceremony on April 6, 1902, Bishop Thomas F. Gailor concluded his sermon with a passage from Isaiah—imploring his listeners to “look unto the rock whence we are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence we are digged” (51:1)—drawing a connection between the magnificence of the new Christ Church and the imperatives of a faithful life.

Christ Church’s decision to relocate took place against a backdrop of rapid urban growth and change. According to census records, Nashville’s population nearly doubled between 1880 and 1890, growing from 43,350 residents to 76,168. The “colored” population (primarily Black, but also encompassing people of Asian and Indigenous descent) in 1890 numbered 29,395, or almost 39 percent of the city’s total. Relations between the city’s white and Black citizens had been in a state of flux since the end of the Civil War, but by the end of the 1880s, a resurgent and emboldened white supremacy had systematically undone most of the promises held by emancipation and Reconstruction. The evolving nature of race relations since the 1860s, oscillating between suffrage for Black men and the extralegal violence of the Ku Klux Klan, had been, by 1890, cemented into legalized segregation, political disenfranchisement, and other injustices that would define the Jim Crow era.

The building of the new Christ Church cannot be separated from this unfortunate history because the building trades were just as segregated as other aspects of life in Nashville and across the South. There are a few different ways to consider this, but the church’s primary building material—the various kinds of rock whence it was hewn—provides the clearest insights.

The church is built primarily of rough-hewn sandstone from Sewanee, TN, a gift from the University of the South. The doorways and windows are trimmed in honed oolite limestone from the White Stone Quarry in Bowling Green, KY, which was also used for the gargoyles, interior arcades, and other accents. (The tower is also limestone, though it was not built until 1947.) The colonnettes framing the entrances and windows along Broadway are marble, and the interior columns are polished granite.

While practices would have varied somewhat from quarry to quarry, depending on the type of stone and the work required to remove it from the ground, the most dangerous, back-breaking work would have mostly been performed by underpaid Black quarrymen. At the White Stone Quarry, for instance, the late-19th century workforce was 69 percent Black, but the stonecutters, who shaped the rough stone at the mill, and the stone carvers, who crafted the ornamentation and other intricate details, were all white. The same was true on the building site. The American Federation of Labor required its affiliates to maintain nondiscrimination policies, but these were largely unenforced, especially in the South. Nashville’s Stone Masons’ Union, like most others, refused to admit Black members. This led the city’s Black masons to form their own union, but opportunities and responsibilities were strictly segregated and decidedly unequal. As historian Louis M. Kyriakoudes recounts, Black masons were largely responsible for laying foundations and for hewing what was called “hard-stone, or country stone, while white stone masons specialized in the higher-skilled, better paying and less arduous soft stone and ornamental work.”

Another widespread Jim Crow-era labor practice—convict leasing—was almost certainly not part of Christ Church’s construction. Forced penal labor was practiced in Tennessee until the mid-1890s when it was outlawed in the aftermath of a violent miners’ strike, but it was mostly confined to railroad building and coal mining. Moreover, as a severe economic depression swept across the country in 1893, the Christ Church vestry borrowed an additional $20,000, which they noted would allow workers on the new church to support their families while most other construction projects were halted. If convict labor had been used, that money would have gone to the prison or the company contracting the laborers and not the workers themselves. Even if prisoners were not involved, the Christ Church building site did otherwise conform to the segregated practices of the day.

Those segregated practices are etched into the fabric of Christ Church and perhaps most visible in the column capitals along the nave. The leaf-like, or foliated, patterns of each one are similar, but no two are exactly the same. These subtle variations are embodiments of Romantic ideals most famously expounded by the English critic John Ruskin. In his influential 1853 essay, “The Nature of Gothic,” Ruskin argued that the uniformity of both neoclassical and modern machine-made ornament was dehumanizing because it made no allowance for individual expression. By contrast, the idiosyncrasies and imperfections of Gothic architecture were “signs of the life and liberty of every workman who struck the stone.” The structure and ornament of Christ Church continue to embody to this day the life and liberty of the white masons who crafted its finished form. But the segregated labor practices of the Jim Crow era denied the Black masons who laid its foundations and quarried its stone the same possibilities. Their labor, anonymous and invisible, was effaced by the celebration of white mason’s individual skill.

Sources and Further Reading

Eleventh Census of the United States: 1890–Population, Part 1, tables 6 & 23.

Fletch Coke, “Christ Church, Episcopal, Nashville,” Tennessee Historical Quarterly 38, no. 2 (Summer 1979): 141–157

Don Harrison Doyle, Nashville in the New South, 1880–1930 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985)

Thomas S. Gailor, “Sermon Preached at the Consecration of Christ Church, Nashville,” April 6, 1902, Christ Church Archives 

Louis M. Kyriakoudes, The Social Origins of the Urban South: Race, Gender, and Migration in Nashville and Middle Tennessee, 1890–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003)

James Patrick, Architecture in Tennessee, 1768–1897 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1981)

Harold M. Rabinowitz, Race Relations in the Urban South, 1865–1890 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978)

Anne Rankin, ed., Christ Church, Nashville, 1829–1929 (Nashville: Marshall & Bruce, 1929)

John Ruskin, “The Nature of Gothic,” in The Stones of Venice, vol. 2 (London: Smith, Elder, & Co., 1853), 151–231

Christy Spurlock Smith, “‘Stone of the Most Beautiful Kind’: The White Stone Quarry of Bowling Green,” The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 92, no. 1 (Winter 1994): 44–72

Alrutheus Ambush Taylor, The Negro in Tennessee, 1865–1880 (Washington, DC: The Associated Publishers, 1941)