Birmingham Churches and Their Cornerstones 70

All Saints’ Episcopal Church is located in the Edgewood neighborhood of Homewood, Alabama. The neighborhood began to develop as a suburb of Birmingham in the 1920s. Initially, a Presbyterian congreation known as Edgewood Community Church served the whole community its origins date from the late nineteenth-century. In 1925, Baptists fomed the own congregation (now Dawson Memorial Bapitst Church). The following year, Methodists followed suit, naming their congregation Trinity after a congregation on Birmingham’s Southside that had recently closed. Two years later, in 1928, Episcopalians completed the division of Edgewood’s Protestants. Like the Methodists, they took the name of their denomination’s closed Southside church, All Saints’.

It would be after World War II, during the rectorship of Marshall Seifert, that All Saints’ lasting buildings would be erected. The complex has four dated stones on the exterior. This most visible is the name stone over the front door, but its content, indicating that the church was erected in 1948, is echoed by the cornerstone below it to the right.

An older stone from 1945 and a newer one from 1997 can be found in the entrance to the lower level of the church from the King Garden.

The 1945 stone would have been moved to this position as part of the 1997 expansion, I assume it was original part of the lower-level of the church which was originally for congregational activities and is now used for the day school.

On these stones we can see the changing spelling of the church’s name: from All Saints (i.e., the church named for all saints) to All Saints’ (i.e. the church under the patronage of, or belonging to, all saints). We can also see a decline of knowledge of Latin. From the placement of “A.D.” (in the year of the Lord) before the year to the incorrect, but very common, placement after the year.

All Saints’ is one of four very similar early post-war churches designed by Charles McCauley. The others are First Lutheran, St. Barnabas Catholic, and Valley Christian.

Read this first post for more on this series on Birmingham churches and their cornerstones.

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