Grace United Methodist Church, Methodist church building in Ponce de Leon Avenue, Atlanta, United States
Grace United Methodist Church is a Gothic Revival church building at 458 Ponce de Leon Avenue in Atlanta, Georgia. Designed by Francis Palmer Smith and completed in 1923, it is trimmed with Indiana limestone. The sanctuary is the centerpiece of a complex that also includes a 1918 Sunday school building.
The congregation started as a mission in 1871 and relocated to its current location after Atlanta's great fire in 1917. The present building was completed in 1923 with designs by architect Francis Palmer Smith.
On August 7, 1960, a small interracial group attended Sunday services here as part of a city-wide campaign for church desegregation, with similar groups visiting First Presbyterian Church and St. Mark Methodist Church that same day. The congregation had taken the name Grace twelve years after its 1871 founding as St. John's Mission.
The church stands on Ponce de Leon Avenue, at the corner of Charles Allen Drive, northeast of downtown Atlanta. The 1923 sanctuary is the main building on the property, with the 1918 Sunday school building beside it. Services are open to the public; attending one is the way to see the interior.
The 1918 Sunday school building was already standing when Francis Palmer Smith was hired in 1922 to design the church, which opened in 1923. The congregation had bought the Ponce de Leon Avenue property with insurance money after its previous building burned in the 1917 Great Atlanta Fire.
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