Qualla: Grace Evangelical and Reformed Church

Grace Evangelical and Reformed Church: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the south wall of Grace Lower Stone Church there is a small inset stone tablet shaped like a clock face. The German inscription reads: 'In the year of Christ, 1795: with God's help.' That phrase records the date the walls were finished, and the walls are something to record: thirty-two inches thick at ground level, twenty-seven at floor level, twenty-one at the gallery. The church is built of local granite quarried in the surrounding fields by the farmers who would worship inside. They were German Reformed settlers who had drifted south from Pennsylvania, and they had been calling their congregation by other names for fifty years before they finished the building.

Grace Evangelical and Reformed Church: The Dutch Settlement

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Between the 1740s and 1750s, a stream of German-speaking settlers, called Pennsylvania Dutch from the misheard 'Deutsch', migrated south from Pennsylvania into the Piedmont of North Carolina. Some were Lutheran, some were Reformed, and they often shared meeting houses in those ea...

Grace Evangelical and Reformed Church: The Granville Grant

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The earliest documented evidence of the present site is a deed dated February 1774, in which Lorentz Lingel conveyed sixteen acres from a larger 1761 Granville Land Grant to Andrew Holshouser and John Lippard. The transfer was 'for the use of the Calvin congregation adjacent or b...

Grace Evangelical and Reformed Church: Walls Like a Fortress

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Construction on the present granite building began after the neighboring Organ Lutheran congregation started theirs in 1792. Grace was completed in 1795. The walls are massive: a 12-foot gable roof rises over a building 51 feet long and 40 feet 9 inches wide, with walls 27 feet h...

Grace Evangelical and Reformed Church: Names in the Churchyard

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The cemetery beside the church is a directory of central piedmont German surnames. Among the older markers are Barringer, Beaver, Berger, Boger, Bost, Brown, Casper, Corl, Fisher, Foil, Holshouser, Isenhower, Klutts, Lingle, Lippard, Lyerly, Miller, Misenheimer, Moose, Peeler, Ri...

Grace Evangelical and Reformed Church: Still Lower Stone

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Grace Church was an early founder of the United Church of Christ, formed in 1957 by the merger of the Evangelical and Reformed Church with the Congregational Christian Churches. In 2005, after a doctrinal dispute, the congregation pulled out of the UCC and aligned itself with the...