A Brief History of St. Matthews Church

Standing on the sidewalk at the front entrance to St. Matthew’s Lutheran Church, it is hard not to follow the façade with the steeple as it climbs to the heavens. You probably won’t feel the tightness of the muscles in your neck and shoulders because your perceptions will have changed from curiosity to awe. The questions quickly begin to mount as you decide to enter the building to investigate the rest of this remarkable tribute to faith.

In 1840, Johann Andreas Wagener and forty-nine other German-speaking citizens formed an ecumenical congregation for the worship of their faith in their native tongue. With the failure of the original idea, the group founded the Evangelical Lutheran Church with Wagener as the president of the congregation. Mr. Wagener’s accomplishments inside and outside the church are many and notable, but the development of the congregation and its physical plant are tied directly to his desire to meld the lives of Charleston’s German citizens and their families to their new home.

In 1841 the group founded the “God’s Acre Cemetery” also known as the Hampstedt Cemetery to provide a place of burial for those killed by a yellow fever outbreak. Within fifteen years more than 1,000 graves filled the space. The congregation started their existence by meeting for worship in the facilities of the Second Presbyterian Church then located on Society St. They moved from there to the German Fire Company on Chalmers St., and finally to rooms at the English-speaking St. Johannes Lutheran Church – then located on Dutch Church Alley.

The first wholly-owned facility for the congregation was built on the corner of Hasell and Anson Streets in 1842. The Greek revival design was designed by Edward Brickell White and dedicated in June of that year. The city as well as the congregation continued to feel the impact of the yellow fever outbreaks and thus bought their second cemetery space in 1856. Bethany Cemetery began to populate rapidly with the deaths of over 600 of the German community over its first eleven

years. Pastor Ludwig Miller conducted as many as three funerals a day during this time.

The listing of damages to any of Charleston’s structures of more than 100 years will repeat itself with fires, hurricanes, and earthquakes. War also took its toll on the shelling of the city during the Civil War. The congregation continued through all of these disasters and found resolve to overcome each one.

As vivid as a written history can be, none is ever more real than that seen firsthand. The terrible fire that swept the church that fateful Wednesday evening in 1965 brought throngs of people to the square to watch in horror as the flames consumed the building and felled the steeple deep into the courtyard. As monstrous as those emotions were that evening, the joy expressed by the citizenry and the congregation when the rebuilt sanctuary was used for the first post-fire service in June of 1966 was profound.

There are considerably more historical notes of interest. The structure, the windows, the altar furniture, and the organs that the church has enjoyed as the fabric of its being over its lifetime have added to the beauty and tone of the spiritual and historical life of the Charleston community.

Many might use the phoenix to describe St. Matthews, but the parishioners would quietly remind themselves of another resurrection from the flames.

~ DAVID JOYNER