Editor’s Note: Historic Churches of Western North Carolina is an ongoing 828newsNOW series exploring the sacred spaces that helped shape mountain communities. Many of these churches began as small mission chapels or neighborhood gathering places. Their histories reveal how faith, culture and daily life intertwined across Western North Carolina. By documenting these buildings and the congregations connected to them, we hope to preserve part of the region’s church history and honor the people whose stories continue to shape the mountains today.
FLAT ROCK, N.C. (828newsNOW.com) — Tucked beneath tall oaks and evergreens along Greenville Highway, St. John in the Wilderness looks like something lifted from an old painting. The pale yellow brick, the bell tower and the hillside cemetery that presses close to the church walls all hint that this is no ordinary parish.
It is the oldest Episcopal church in the Diocese of Western North Carolina and one of the most layered historic sites in Henderson County.
A summer chapel in the “Little Charleston of the Mountains”
The story of St. John begins with Charles and Susan Baring, members of a prominent banking family from England who had settled in the South Carolina Lowcountry. The Barings began spending summers in Flat Rock in the 1820s to escape the heat and disease of the lowcountry. In 1827 they bought land and built their Flat Rock estate, Mountain Lodge, helping set off a wave of Charleston families who followed them to the mountains of Western North Carolina. The settlement became known as the “Little Charleston of the Mountains.”…