Ever guided and impelled by the same spirit, vision and sense of mission that led to its founding in 1832, Immanuel Church, La Grange, Tennessee, is still a continually active Episcopal Church at the present time.

This Protestant Episcopal Church was first established as a mission in 1832, consecrated in 1843 with Reverend Samuel George Litton as its missionary and first rector. 

Located an hour’s drive due east from Memphis, on Highway 57 through Germantown and Collierville, today La Grange is a quiet, peaceful town with less than 200 inhabitants.  Sitting high on a bluff overlooking the Wolf River and north Mississippi, La Grange was an Indian trading post in the early 19^th century and a thriving settlement by 1825.  The town street plan was laid out and patterned after Philadelphia, PA by Samuel B. Harper, who was also the first Sheriff of Fayette County.  The town was first incorporated in 1824.

Southwest Tennessee attracted a large westward flow of wealthy, educated and cultured people migrating primarily from the Carolinas and Virginia in the 1820’s.  Included in this migration was the John Anderson family and Mr. Anderson’s mother-in-law, Mrs. Mary Hayes Willis Gloster, who came with a number of other relatives to La Grange from Warrenton, NC in 1827.  Mrs. Gloster, a doctor’s widow, a devout Episcopalian and a very determined woman, was increasingly disturbed that there were no churches of any kind in La Grange.  At the age of 52 with her son-in-law, she made a daring and dangerous horseback ride to Franklin, TN, through some 200 miles of wilderness to seek help on this from the Reverend James Hervey Otey.

The Rev. Mr. Otey was a young missionary priest and a schoolmaster who had come recently from Warrenton.  He was Mrs. Gloster’s godson and Mr. Anderson’s good friend.  He was to become the first Bishop of Tennessee.

His intervention brought another missionary priest, the Rev. Mr. Thomas Wright from New York, and in 1832 Immanuel Church was organized, the first Episcopal Church west of the Tennessee River.  Later that same year the Rev. Mr. Wright helped establish Episcopal Churches in Jackson, Brownsville and Randolph, and Calvary in Memphis.

As La Grange continued to thrive, Memphis, 50 miles to the west and established only approximately 7 or 8 years before at that time, was generally considered a rowdy river town.  For decades more sophisticated Memphians were to come to La Grange by horseback or horse-drawn conveyance, and later by the old La Grange-Memphis Railway (later known as the Memphis-Charleston Railway), to shop and to attend schools and cultural events.  It was during this period of high promise and prosperity that the present Immanuel Church building was erected on Gloster-Anderson land by slave labor with handmade bricks and hand-hewn timbers from nearby virgin forestlands.  The present building was consecrated by Bishop Otey in 1843.  It is in the classical style of rural English village churches and, more specifically, a closely patterned copy of the Gloster family’s  former Immanuel Church in Warrenton, NC.

La Grange was occupied by Union forces from the time of the fall of Memphis on June 13, 1862, until the end of the Civil War.  Immanuel was confiscated as an ordinance depot, and later used as a Union hospital.  The building was terribly abused.  The pews and chancel furniture were used to make coffins for the Union dead.