Chatswood South Uniting Church, Sydney, Gothic Revival church in Lane Cove North, Australia.
Chatswood South Uniting Church is a Gothic Revival stone church at 518 Pacific Highway, Lane Cove North, designed probably by Thomas Rowe and built in 1871 by congregation members Bryson, Leet, Johnson and Montgomery. It has a timber shingle roof lined with cedar and a small belfry on its east side; a transept and porch added in 1883 gave it a cruciform plan.
The site was established in 1871 when trustees purchased two acres from David Scott Mitchell. This building represented the third Methodist church on Sydney's North Shore and showed the expansion of the denomination in the region.
The churchyard on the east side opened in the early 1870s; the first burial was the infant Mary Elizabeth Holland. Closed in 1924, it was rededicated in 1984 as the Pioneers' Memorial Reserve and is one of only two surviving churchyard cemeteries on Sydney's north shore.
The property was sold in 2017 for redevelopment, so the church is no longer in active worship use. The site sits on a sloping corner of the Pacific Highway, with the cemetery on the east side of the building. Large turpentine trees are scattered across the grounds.
The camellia in the cemetery's north-west corner grew from a flower taken from the buttonhole of Hugh Bryson, killed in a riding accident in 1878. His fiancée planted it on his grave at the funeral, and it took root beside the Bryson graves.
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