St. Stephen's Episcopal Church is a historic Episcopal church located in Earleville,

Cecil County, Maryland Cecil County is a county located in the U.S. state of Maryland at the northeastern corner of the state, bordering both Pennsylvania and Delaware. As of the 2020 United States census, the population was 103,725. The county seat is Elkton. The ...

. North Sassafras Parish, as it was originally known, was one of the original 30 Anglican parishes in the Province of Maryland, named for its location north of the

Sassafras River The Sassafras River is a tributary of the Chesapeake Bay on the Delmarva Peninsula in the United States. It is approximately longU.S. Geological Survey. National Hydrography Dataset high-resolution flowline dataThe National Map accessed April ...

which separated Cecil County from

Kent County, Maryland Kent County is a county located in the U.S. state of Maryland. As of the 2020 census, its population was 19,198, making it the least populous county in Maryland. Its county seat is Chestertown. The county was named for the county of Kent in ...

. On June 22, 1834, this parish hosted the ordination as an Episcopal deacon by bishop William Murray Stone of William Douglass, a Methodist preacher who then became the second rector of the historic African Episcopal Church of St. Thomas in Philadelphia (after

Absalom Jones Absalom Jones (November 7, 1746February 13, 1818) was an African-American abolitionist and clergyman who became prominent in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Disappointed at the racial discrimination he experienced in a local Methodist church, he foun ...

), where the African American abolitionist was ordained as a priest and served until his death in 1862. The current church has a single-story rectangular stuccoed brick main block, three bays by three, resting on a partially excavated

fieldstone Fieldstone is a naturally occurring type of stone, which lies at or near the surface of the Earth. Fieldstone is a nuisance for farmers seeking to expand their land under cultivation, but at some point it began to be used as a construction mate ...

foundation and covered by a steeply pitched

slate Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous, metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade, regional metamorphism. It is the finest-grained foliated metamorphic ro ...

roof. It features a 4-story

bell tower A bell tower is a tower that contains one or more bells, or that is designed to hold bells even if it has none. Such a tower commonly serves as part of a Christian church, and will contain church bells, but there are also many secular bell to ...

with broach spire and patterned slate roof. This

Gothic Revival Gothic Revival (also referred to as Victorian Gothic or neo-Gothic) is an Architectural style, architectural movement that after a gradual build-up beginning in the second half of the 17th century became a widespread movement in the first half ...

structure was built in 1870–1874 but incorporated the walls of the earlier churches of 1824 and 1735. A graveyard surrounds the structure. The structure was designed by Thomas Dixon, a Baltimore architect. It was listed on the

National Register of Historic Places The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the Federal government of the United States, United States federal government's official United States National Register of Historic Places listings, list of sites, buildings, structures, Hist ...

in 1982.

References

External links

*, including photo from 1968, at Maryland Historical Trust Episcopal church buildings in Maryland 19th-century Episcopal church buildings Churches in Cecil County, Maryland Churches on the National Register of Historic Places in Maryland Gothic Revival church buildings in Maryland Thomas Dixon (architect) buildings 1860 establishments in Maryland National Register of Historic Places in Cecil County, Maryland {{Maryland-Anglican-church-stub