St. John in the Wilderness is historically recognized as the first Episcopal parish established in Western North Carolina. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1973.
Decades before its official organization in 1836, the densely wooded forests of Flat Rock, North Carolina, functioned as a seasonal respite for affluent planters from Charleston’s Lowcountry. These families traveled north each summer to escape the heat and recurrent malaria outbreaks that had become a major health issue in the coastal region of South Carolina.
Charles Baring, a member of the Baring Brothers banking family in England, brought his British-born wife, Susan, to Flat Rock due to its favorable climate and air quality. She had inherited substantial wealth from her late husband, Charleston’s James Heyward.
In 1827, the couple built Mountain Lodge, a 400-acre estate designed in the style of an English country manor. Nine years after its completion, Baring began to sell large tracts of his land to other Charleston families, establishing a prominent summer colony for the Lowcountry’s elite.
As the seasonal community grew, Charles Baring built, in 1832, a small wooden chapel for family services. After a forest fire destroyed the timber structure in 1833, the building was rebuilt. Parish records and archaeological documents confirm that enslaved laborers at the estate handmade the bricks, constructed the chapel, and maintained the landscape and grounds.
On August 27, 1836, the Barings deeded the chapel to the Episcopal Diocese of North Carolina, allowing twenty local families to organize a formal congregation. Reverend Thomas S. W. Mott was selected to serve as its first official rector. On the following day, Bishop Levi Silliman Ives, the second Episcopal Bishop of North Carolina, consecrated the building, establishing it as the first Episcopal church in the region.
Susan Baring died in 1846 and was buried in a vault on the church grounds.
While the exact origin of the church name remains unknown, accountings differ primarily between two theories. One associates the name with a fourteenth-century church near the Baring family’s ancestral home in Devon, England, while another suggests the name simply describes the densely forested mountain wilderness of early Flat Rock. Because there is no documentation to explain the Barings’ choice, historians cannot determine conclusively whether the name honored the Barings’ English heritage, described the setting, or combined both meanings.
In 1852, to accommodate Flat Rock’s growing seasonal population, the parish commissioned Charleston architect Edward C. Jones to enlarge the church. Executed by Asheville builder Ephraim Clayton, Jones’ design doubled the size of the structure and introduced a European-style double hammer-beam truss system to support the new roof. To preserve Susan Baring’s grave, the expansion was built directly over the family plot, leaving her crypt beneath the main floor near her former family pew. Following his own death in 1865, Charles Baring was buried alongside her within the vault.
The church’s design also differed from that of many churches in the antebellum South because it was built without the typical segregated galleries or slave balconies that were common during that era. Wealthy summer residents and enslaved members of the community worshiped together on the main floor. Church registries record the June 9, 1855, marriage of Caesar Edwards and Venus Grant as the first documented wedding of enslaved individuals at the church.
For more than a century, St. John in the Wilderness remained closely connected to Charleston society. Parish leadership maintained seasonal ties with South Carolina, and seating within the church was assigned through rented family pew subscriptions. This practice continued until the parish adopted open seating in 1960.
Although recognized for its distinctive, nineteenth-century architectural aesthetic, the churchyard also includes a 23-acre cemetery with approximately one hundred graves of enslaved individuals dating from 1836 to 1881. In 2015, a memorial cross was erected by the church to honor those whose lives were connected to the site.
The churchyard’s gravesites stand as the final resting place for a cross-section of prominent nineteenth-century figures in American political and military history. Burials include the family plot of Christopher Memminger, the first Confederate secretary of the Treasury, alongside Edward Rutledge, a descendant of a South Carolina signer of the Declaration of Independence, whose gravesite sits a short distance uphill from the Memminger site. Nearby on the same northern slope lies the Reverend John Grimké Drayton, the developer of Charleston’s Magnolia Gardens and rector of the parish for forty years.
The cemetery’s historical interest extends far beyond the affluent ruling class, however. Major General Edward P. King Jr., who led American and Filipino forces during the defense of the Bataan Peninsula in World War II, is also buried on the grounds. Nearby is the tomb of James Brown, a veteran of the Royal Scots Greys and a bugler at the Battle of Waterloo in 1815. Local tradition suggests that long after Brown’s body was exhumed and returned to Scotland, moonshiners used the empty brick-and-marble cavity beneath his tombstone as a secret cache to hide illegal whiskey during Prohibition.
Historically, knowledge of the churchyard relied solely on the markers preserved above ground. That changed in 2023 when a church archives researcher discovered a repair receipt from 1884 with the phrase “servants’ house” scribbled on it. This prompted Historic Flat Rock to investigate the surrounding woodlands using LiDAR imaging, which revealed the outlines of previously unknown structures concealed beneath the many years of dense vegetation.
Following an initial review by the North Carolina Office of State Archaeology, the Reverend Joshua Stephens commissioned professional archaeological fieldwork in early 2025 that uncovered the foundations of a laborers’ cabin, a spring, and a walled enclosure. Ceramics and personal objects were also recovered during the excavation.
To display these findings, the church established the Trails of St. John, a public path network that follows the layout of the property and links the archaeological remains. The trails opened to visitors with the grand opening ribbon cutting ceremony held on September 7, 2025.
St. John in the Wilderness sits atop a quiet, forested knoll, at the corner of Greenville Highway and Rutledge drive in Flat Rock, North Carolina, where the grounds embody the property’s historic character. The site documents the history of its founding families, the enslaved laborers who constructed and maintained it, and successive generations of those who worshiped there. Its legacy is preserved within both the church’s architecture and the archaeological record of its grounds.