Grace Episcopal Church

The congregation was organized in 1827, but the building people see came later. Charles Nevitt Gibbons built the Gothic Revival church, finished around 1860 with an organ of the same year, and Bishop Leonidas Polk is said to have laid the cornerstone. Union gunboats damaged it badly in 1863, and its present look dates to repairs and rebuilding in 1893. The churchyard holds the tomb of a Union naval officer, John E. Hart, whose funeral that same year is acted out every June. The church was added to the National Register in 1979.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Rosedown Plantation State Historic Site — 1.7 mi
  A cotton plantation worked by hundreds of enslaved people, whose names survive in an 1862 succession list; the Turnbull house and gardens, and the quarters nobody has yet found.
• Audubon State Historic Site — 4.6 mi
  Oakley House, where Audubon taught drawing and painted 32 birds in 1821, and the two cabins behind it where four Black families lived through slavery, Reconstruction and Jim Crow.
• Port Hudson State Historic Site — 8.4 mi
  The 48-day siege of 1863 on the Mississippi bluffs, where the Louisiana Native Guards and Captain Andre Cailloux led the first assault; earthworks, a six-mile trail and a museum.
• Louisiana State Penitentiary Museum — 18 mi
  The Angola museum outside the penitentiary gate, opened in 1997 on the history of crime and punishment in Louisiana, on ground where convicts were leased out as what 64 Parishes calls legal slave labor.

More markers nearby

• British West Florida — steps away
• Courthouse — steps away
• Old Burying Ground — steps away
• Temple Sinai — steps away