St. James Episcopal Church

Bishop Leonidas Polk organized Alexandria's first Episcopal congregation in 1844. Federal troops burned the church in 1864. A tornado destroyed the second building in 1872. The current sanctuary, completed in 1926 on Bolton Avenue, is the third. The bell from the 1874 church still hangs. The original altar still stands. What survives tells you what mattered enough to carry forward through fire and wind—not the walls, but the objects that made the space sacred. Three buildings, one congregation, the same altar where hands were laid and vows spoken before the war and after the storm. This is a church built by people who knew buildings fall down. They kept what they could.