Racial History of St. Columba's
Prepared for St. Columba’s Episcopal Church
Sondra L. Mills, January 2024
St. Columba’s Episcopal Church is today among the largest and wealthiest parishes in the Diocese of Washington. Located in the Tenleytown neighborhood of Northwest Washington, D.C., the church property includes the stone chapel and spacious gathering areas known as the Commons and the Great Hall. A large wing houses church offices, a music room, lounge, library, several meeting rooms, and a bustling nursery school. The grounds include a playground and outdoor gathering space, a Columbarium, various garden areas, and a parking lot. For 2021, the parish budget exceeded $3 million. The church is completing a $2.4 million renovation.
The church is served by three regular clergy, a priest assistant, a deacon, a director of operations, two musicians on staff, and more than a dozen additional staff members. Like its surrounding neighborhood, St. Columba’s parishioners, clergy, and staff, with notable exceptions, have been predominantly White.
But St. Columba’s has not always been prosperous, and the surrounding Tenleytown community has not always been so predominantly White. St. Columba’s parish has shaped, and been shaped by, the story of Tenleytown -- the neighborhood occupying the highest point overlooking Washington. Its long history includes the Native American tribes who thrived there for centuries, the English settlers who brought slavery and the Anglican church to the area, plantations worked by enslaved persons, Civil War forts, homes and churches built by the formerly enslaved, and Jim Crow segregation.
Understanding how St. Columba’s grew from a small mission chapel established by St. Alban’s parish in 1874 calls for an examination of the lasting effects of deliberate and systemic racist policies and practices in the United States since the 1700’s, specifically including in Washington, D.C., Tenleytown, and the Episcopal church. This paper endeavors to gather facts that will help the parish and the Diocese of Washington understand how racism has shaped St. Columba’s since its founding. In doing so, it examines the history of the land the parish occupies, the people who founded the church, and the church’s relationship with the African American community that once thrived within the parish boundaries, including its own mission chapel, St. George’s.
Finally, this paper is not the last word but a starting point: parishioners are invited to add their recollections of the church’s racial past and their hopes for the future.
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Racial history of St. Columba's
