Appalachian Churches Series – Oldest Catholic Parish in Maryland: St. John the Evangelist Church in Frederick
St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church in Frederick, Maryland, rises above the clustered spires of town with a bell tower that still marks the skyline and anchors more than two and a half centuries of Catholic life at the eastern gateway to the Appalachian region. Founded in 1763, generations of Frederick County Catholics have passed through its doors and out to its hillside cemetery, leaving behind sacramental records, commemorative booklets, and stone markers that let us trace a story from penal-era house chapels to a Greek Revival landmark and a diverse twenty first century parish.
Catholics on the Maryland Frontier
In the middle of the eighteenth century, Catholics in colonial Maryland walked a careful line. The colony’s original experiment in toleration had eroded, and British penal laws restricted public Catholic worship. Mass could be celebrated, but not in buildings that looked like churches. For Catholics in what would become Frederick, the answer was a brick house on Second Street where a Jesuit priest began serving the community around 1763. The chapel inside that home was dedicated to St. Stanislaus Kostka, and it functioned as a hidden parish church long before anyone dared raise a steeple in town.
When the American Revolution swept away the old legal restrictions and the Holy See established the Diocese of Baltimore in 1789, the community in Frederick was ready to step out of the shadows. The people who had worshiped in the house chapel organized themselves into what would be known as St. John the Evangelist, and in 1800 they laid the cornerstone for their first purpose built church, under the leadership of Sulpician priest John DuBois. The brick church rose on East Second Street and gave Catholics in Frederick County their first visible home, even as many of their neighbors in the surrounding countryside still relied on visiting priests and house chapels well into the nineteenth century.
The early sacramental registers for the parish, now preserved in the parish office and in the archives of the Archdiocese of Baltimore, record baptisms, marriages, and burials of German, Irish, French, and Black Catholics who navigated that transition from hidden worship to public parish life. Those registers, together with later jubilee booklets, give historians the names, kinship networks, and religious practices that lie behind the bare dates of 1763 and 1800.
Father John McElroy and the 1837 Greek Revival Church
By the 1820s, the 1800 church was already too small for the growing Catholic population of Frederick and the surrounding countryside. In 1822, Irish born Jesuit priest John McElroy became pastor at St. John. He soon added a boys’ school, St. John’s Literary Institution, and dreamed of a new church that would match both the size and the aspirations of the Catholic community in the town.
McElroy eventually made the bold decision to replace the 1800 brick church altogether. Construction on a new building began in 1833, using local architect John Tien or Tehan, and four years later, on April 26, 1837, the new St. John’s church was solemnly consecrated. Parish tradition remembers that the consecration lasted about five hours and drew bishops from across the young United States. Contemporary Catholic histories later echoed that pride, noting that St. John’s was the first Catholic church to be formally consecrated in the Baltimore diocese and, at the time, the largest parish church in the country.
The new church was built in the Greek Revival style that had come into fashion for courthouses and public buildings. City and parish histories point out that its façade, with Ionic pilasters and a broad pediment, was modeled on classical prototypes like the Parthenon and signaled both civic confidence and Catholic arrival in downtown Frederick. The cruciform plan follows a Latin cross, measuring roughly 104 feet in length and 94 in width, with a generous nave and transepts that could receive worshipers from town and farm alike.
Above the Second Street entrance, a sculpted figure of St. John the Evangelist stands eleven feet tall, flanked by an eagle and angels holding tablets inscribed with lines from the prologue to John’s Gospel: “In principio erat verbum” and “Et verbum caro factum est.” Parish histories and the modern Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties file both emphasize this iconography as a statement of identity for a church named for the evangelist whose Gospel opens with the Word made flesh.
Inside, the church accumulated layers of devotional art that mark turning points in parish history. A painting of the Crucifixion by Italian artist Pietro Gagliardi was hung in 1843. In 1912, for the seventy fifth anniversary of the church’s consecration, the parish commissioned an Ascension scene for the center of the ceiling from Italian painter Severino Baraldi and published a jubilee booklet titled “Seventy Fifth Anniversary of the Consecration of St. John’s Catholic Church, Frederick, Maryland,” which narrated the story of the 1837 building and its clergy up to that point. The high altar, made of Egyptian and Italian marble, and the sixteen foot windows topped with busts of St. John, were described in that booklet and later parish histories as tangible signs of the care and resources that Frederick’s Catholics poured into their church.
Tower, Skyline, and the Frederick Historic District
The most familiar feature of St. John’s to modern visitors is its three stage bell tower, completed in 1857. Rising to 145 feet and capped with a cupola and cross, the tower quickly became the tallest structure in Frederick and remains so today. Together with the nearby Lutheran and Reformed spires, it helps explain why nineteenth century observers began calling Frederick the “city of clustered spires.”
By the 1850s, the church was prominent enough in the townscape that Baltimore lithographer Edward Sachse included it in his 1854 bird’s eye “View of Frederick, Maryland.” Later descriptions of that lithograph note how the Catholic church stands in a line of steeples over the rooftops and warehouses, a reminder that Catholicism was now fully part of downtown Frederick’s visual identity.
St. John’s sits within the Frederick Historic District, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In the nomination inventory, the church appears as “FHD 744 — St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church” at 118 East Second Street, a contributing resource that represents the Greek Revival phase of the district’s religious architecture. The associated listing also notes the adjoining convent and the nearby Visitation Academy as related resources that formed a Catholic precinct within the larger downtown grid.
Historic American Buildings Survey photographers documented the church and its convent in 1936, and those images at the Library of Congress show the exterior of St. John’s much as it appeared to New Deal era visitors: Ionic façade, tall windows, and tower rising above surrounding brick streetscapes. The HABS listing, cited in local Civil War heritage materials, has since become a standard visual reference point for scholars and preservationists.
St. John’s Cemetery: Refugees, Jesuits, and Soldiers
Just a few blocks away on East Third Street, St. John’s Cemetery extends the story of the parish into the realm of memory and landscape. The first known burial on the grounds was that of Henry, a free Black man who died of cholera in 1832, more than a decade before the parish formally established the cemetery in 1845. That detail, preserved in newspaper accounts and compiled histories, shows that the hillside overlooking town became sacred ground first through the needs of the living community, then through formal consecration.
The cemetery tells several overlapping stories. One is the presence of French refugee families from Saint Domingue, who fled the Haitian Revolution and eventually settled in the Frederick area. Members of the Bellumeau de la Vincendière family, associated with the L’Hermitage plantation, are buried here, along with later generations such as Enoch Louis Lowe, who became governor of Maryland. Another is the burial of European veterans who fought under Napoleon and other flags, followed by Americans from the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and nearly every major conflict through Vietnam. A modern summary counts three Revolutionary War soldiers, one from the French and Indian War, seventeen from the War of 1812, and dozens from the Civil War and later wars.
The cemetery is also the final resting place for many of the clergy and religious who built up St. John’s parish. A Jesuit cemetery was opened in 1805 on the grounds of the novitiate across from the church on East Second Street. When the novitiate closed in 1903 and Jesuit staffing of the parish came to an end the following year, seventy nine Jesuits, along with other notable burials such as Chief Justice Roger Brooke Taney, were relocated to St. John’s Cemetery. Among those Jesuits is John McElroy himself, whose grave and personal crucifix are preserved as part of the cemetery chapel dedicated in 2009.
In 1998, local historian and funeral director Keith Roberson helped identify forgotten Civil War burials in the cemetery and secured federal markers for ten Union soldiers whose graves had never been properly marked. Their dedication, reported in the Frederick News Post and summarized in the cemetery’s modern reference entry, underscored how much of the war’s human cost was still hidden in plain sight in Frederick’s Catholic graveyard.
Civil War Hospitals, Jails, and Contested Memory
Frederick’s churches became improvised hospitals and barracks more than once during the Civil War, and St. John’s has often stood at the center of that story. The Crossroads of War heritage project describes the 1837 church as a hospital during the war and notes an oft repeated anecdote that its tall windows made it suitable for Confederate wounded because escape would be difficult. Parish based accounts, echoed in the Catholic Review’s coverage of St. John’s anniversaries and referenced in a parish history cited on Wikipedia, emphasize a different tradition that the building itself was used as a temporary jail for captured Confederate soldiers, while the Jesuit novitiate and the nearby Visitation Academy served as hospital wards.
Both strands agree that the church and its neighborhood were deeply involved in the war’s upheavals, and both send researchers toward the same sources: nineteenth century newspapers, army hospital records, and the testimony of local residents preserved in letters and memoirs. Whether the main sanctuary served primarily as a hospital ward or as a makeshift jail, there is no question that wounded and imprisoned men lay within earshot of its bells while the town around them filled with wagon trains of casualties from Antietam, Gettysburg, and Monocacy.
The cemetery adds another layer to that Civil War story. Crossroads of War points out that St. John’s Cemetery is one of the rare places where Confederate soldiers, Union white soldiers, and a Union African American soldier rest within the same Catholic burial ground. The African American soldier is identified as George Washington of the 23rd United States Colored Infantry, who had worked at the nearby Jesuit novitiate before the war. Combined with the total of thirty four Union and sixteen Confederate soldiers counted in modern cemetery histories, that mixture makes St. John’s an important site for scholars of race, religion, and memory in the border region.
Schools, Sisters, and a Catholic Neighborhood
From the beginning, St. John’s was more than a church building. Under John DuBois and John McElroy, the parish became the nucleus of a Catholic educational complex that reached across Frederick County and into the broader Catholic world. DuBois, who would go on to found what is now Mount St. Mary’s University, started St. John’s Literary Institution in Frederick in the 1820s as a school for boys. McElroy expanded that work, and he later drew on the experience he gained in Frederick when he founded Boston College in the 1860s.
Across the street from the church, the Jesuit novitiate and the buildings that would become the Visitation Academy housed young religious and students, creating a Catholic neighborhood in the blocks around Second Street. The Daughters of Charity, the Visitation Sisters, and later the School Sisters of Notre Dame all left their mark on the parish and its schools. Over time, St. John’s Literary Institution evolved and relocated, eventually becoming St. John’s Catholic Prep in Buckeystown, which still traces its origins to McElroy’s school in Frederick.
Today, St. John Regional Catholic School carries forward that educational tradition for younger students, explicitly connecting its mission to the legacy of the parish, the Jesuits, and the religious communities that once filled these blocks with novices, sisters, and schoolchildren. The church, cemetery, and surviving school buildings on and near Second Street together form an unusually intact Catholic landscape inside a larger downtown historic district.
Twentieth Century Change and Twenty First Century Parish Life
The twentieth century brought change, maintenance, and renewal rather than new construction. Jesuits handed parish administration to diocesan clergy in 1901, but their influence remained visible in the altar, devotional art, and cemetery. The 1912 Ascension painting on the nave ceiling, completed for the consecration’s seventy fifth anniversary, marked one phase of beautification. The later installation and replacement of stained glass followed another. Parish narratives remember that mid century windows were plainer and were eventually replaced for reasons of both condition and aesthetics.
In 2023, the parish marked the 260th anniversary of its founding with a Mass that also celebrated newly installed stained glass windows transplanted from a closed church in Swoyersville, Pennsylvania. The Catholic Review’s coverage of that celebration described how the 1940s windows depicting Gospel scenes and mysteries of Christ were adapted to fit St. John’s tall openings and blessed by Archbishop William Lori, who reminded parishioners that their old parish is kept young by the life of its people.
The parish homepage today describes St. John as the oldest parish in the Archdiocese of Baltimore, founded in 1763, and the present church as the oldest consecrated Catholic church in the area. It proudly notes that the bell tower is the highest spire in Frederick and that St. John’s serves as mother church to other Catholic parishes in the county. The same page highlights a large Latino community, parishioners from across the globe, and a full schedule of English and Spanish Masses that fill the nineteenth century building with twenty first century worship.
St. John’s in the Appalachian Story
Although Frederick stands east of the high ridges that most people associate with Appalachia, it has long been a crossroads between the coastal plain and the mountains. Troops marched through on their way to Antietam and south toward the Shenandoah Valley. Farm families from the Middletown Valley and the eastern edge of the Blue Ridge rode or walked into town for markets, courts, and Mass.
St. John the Evangelist’s sacramental registers and cemetery tell that wider Appalachian edge story as clearly as they tell a local one. Free and enslaved African Americans, French refugees from the Caribbean, Irish laborers, German farmers, and later Appalachian migrants all appear in the records and in the burial ground. The parish’s ties to Mount St. Mary’s in Emmitsburg and to Catholic schools beyond Maryland knit Frederick’s Catholics into networks that reached into the mountains and out to Boston and New York.
For Appalachian historians, St. John’s offers a case study in how a single downtown church can be both deeply local and quietly regional. Its architecture is Greek Revival, but its story reaches from Saint Domingue to the Monocacy, from Revolutionary War veterans to a soldier of the United States Colored Troops, from a brick house chapel under penal laws to a towering spire that still marks the skyline.
Sources & Further Reading
St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church. “History.” St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church, Frederick, Maryland. https://stjohn-frederick.org/history-2/
St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church. “St. John Cemetery.” St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church, Frederick, Maryland. https://stjohn-frederick.org/stjohncemetery/
St. John’s Cemetery, Inc. “St. John’s Cemetery – Frederick, Maryland.” St. John’s Cemetery official site. https://www.stjohnscemetery-md.org/
“St. John’s Cemetery, Frederick, Maryland.” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John%27s_Cemetery%2C_Frederick%2C_Maryland
“St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church (Frederick, Maryland).” Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St._John_the_Evangelist_Catholic_Church_%28Frederick%2C_Maryland%29
Crossroads of War: Civil War Sites in Maryland. “St. John the Evangelist Roman Catholic Church and Cemetery.” Crossroads of War. https://www.crossroadsofwar.org/see-the-sites/st-john-the-evangelist-roman-catholic-church-and-cemetery
Graveyard Rabbit of Maryland. “St. John’s Cemetery – Frederick, MD.” Graveyard Rabbit of Maryland blog, November 8, 2009. https://graveyardrabbitofmd.wordpress.com/2009/11/08/st-johns-cemtery-frederick-md/
Civil War Potomac. “Dispatch from the Field: St. John’s Cemetery, Frederick, MD (Part 1).” Civil War Potomac blog, December 10, 2016. https://civilwarpotomac.wordpress.com/2016/12/10/dispatch-from-the-field-st-johns-cemetery-frederick-md-part-1/
Civil War Potomac. “Dispatch from the Field: St. John’s Cemetery, Frederick, MD (Part 2).” Civil War Potomac blog, December 16, 2016. https://civilwarpotomac.wordpress.com/2016/12/16/dispatch-from-the-field-st-johns-cemetery-frederick-md-part-2/
Archdiocese of Baltimore. “St. John the Evangelist in Frederick Celebrates History as Archdiocese’s Oldest Parish.” Catholic Review, April 29, 2013. https://www.archbalt.org/st-john-the-evangelist-in-frederick-celebrates-history-as-archdioceses-oldest-parish/
Wiering, Maria. “Frederick Church Marks 175th.” Catholic Review, May 6, 2012. https://www.archbalt.org/frederick-church-marks-175th/
Gunty, Christopher. “Frederick Parish Marks 260th Anniversary with Blessing of ‘New’ Windows.” Catholic Review, September 11, 2023. https://catholicreview.org/frederick-parish-marks-260th-anniversary-with-blessing-of-new-windows/
St. John Regional Catholic School. “Catholic History & Tradition in Frederick, MD.” St. John Regional Catholic School. https://sjrcs.org/about-us/history-tradition/
St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church. “Plan Your Visit.” St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church, Frederick, Maryland. https://stjohn-frederick.org/plan-your-visit/
Visit Frederick. “St. John the Evangelist Catholic Church.” Visit Frederick tourism listing. https://www.visitfrederick.org/listing/st-john-the-evangelist-catholic-church/2923/
Visit Frederick. “Catholic Heritage Tour in Frederick County, MD.” Group itinerary. https://www.visitfrederick.org/groups-meetings/groups/itineraries/catholic-heritage-tour/
Visit Maryland. “Catholic Heritage Tour.” Maryland Office of Tourism. https://www.visitmaryland.org/catholic-heritage-tour
Tourism Council of Frederick County. “Historic Houses of Worship.” Candlelight Tour of Historic Houses of Worship brochure, 2024. https://assets.simpleviewinc.com/simpleview/image/upload/v1/clients/frederickcountymd/TFC_HHW_Brochure_8_24_c5f3bd1f-d8a5-43f0-848d-055a4a396c7a.pdf
Maryland Historical Trust. “Frederick Historic District, NRID 202.” Maryland’s National Register Properties. https://apps.mht.maryland.gov/nr/NRDetail.aspx?NRID=202
Maryland Historical Trust. MHT Library Vertical File List. Entry FHD-744, “Saint John the Evangelist Catholic Church, 118 East Second Street, Frederick, Md.” https://mht.maryland.gov/Documents/research/MHT-Library-Vertical-File-List.pdf
National Park Service and Maryland Historical Trust. Frederick Historic District National Register of Historic Places Nomination Form (NR-206). https://apps.mht.maryland.gov/medusa/PDF/NR_PDFs/NR-206.pdf
City of Frederick Planning Department. Overview History of Frederick. City of Frederick historic context PDF. https://www.cityoffrederickmd.gov/DocumentCenter/View/509/Overview-History-of-Frederick?bidId=
City of Frederick Planning Department. History of Architecture. City of Frederick architectural context PDF. https://www.cityoffrederickmd.gov/DocumentCenter/View/495/History-of-Architecture?bidId=
Maryland Center for History and Culture. “View of Frederick, Maryland.” Print Collection digital entry. https://www.mdhistory.org/resources/view-of-frederick-maryland/
E. Sachse & Co. View of Frederick, Maryland, circa 1854. Color lithograph. Oversize Print Collection, V46, H. Furlong Baldwin Library, Maryland Center for History and Culture. Finding aid and item record at https://mdhistory.libraryhost.com/repositories/2/archival_objects/102882
Williams, Thomas J. C., and Folger McKinsey. History of Frederick County, Maryland, from the Earliest Settlements to the Beginning of the War Between the States; Continued from the Beginning of the Year 1861 Down to the Present Time. 2 vols. Frederick, MD: L. R. Titsworth and Co., 1910. Digital edition via HathiTrust: https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=chi.56019657
Butler, Christopher N. Historic Frederick County: The Story of Frederick & Frederick County. San Antonio, TX: Historical Society of Frederick County and HPN Books, 2015. Publisher e-paper at https://www.yumpu.com/en/document/view/62168865/historic-frederick-county-the-story-of-frederick-frederick-county
Christensen, George A. “Here Lies the Supreme Court: Revisited.” Journal of Supreme Court History 33, no. 1 (2008): 17–41. PDF via Supreme Court Historical Society: https://supremecourthistory.org/assets/schs-journal/pub_journal_2008_vol_1.pdf
Archdiocese of Baltimore. “Sacramental Records.” Archdiocese of Baltimore. https://www.archbalt.org/chancery/sacramental-records/
Catholic Heritage Archive and Archdiocese of Baltimore Archives. “Archdiocese of Baltimore Archives – Sacramental Registers and Genealogy.” Catholic Heritage Archive. https://stmarys.edu/archives/collections/archdiocese-of-baltimore-archives/
Maryland State Archives. “Catholic Church Records.” Guide to Government Records. https://guide.msa.maryland.gov/pages/viewer.aspx?page=catholicchurchrecords
Findmypast. “Baltimore Roman Catholic Parish Congregational Records.” Catholic Heritage Archive collection description. https://www.findmypast.com/discover/birth-marriage-death-and-parish-records/parish-registers/baltimore-roman-catholic-parish-congregational-records
Events Frederick. “Historic Sites in Frederick MD: Exploring the City’s Rich Heritage.” EventsFrederick.com guide. https://eventsfrederick.com/resources/guides/activities/historic-sites/
Visit Maryland. “Can’t Miss Things to Do Around Frederick.” Maryland Office of Tourism. https://www.visitmaryland.org/list/cant-miss-things-to-do-around-frederick
Author Note: I first traced St. John the Evangelist’s story while following how Catholic parishes grew along the roads into mountain Maryland. I hope this article helps you see that brick church and hillside cemetery as a borderland place where early Catholic education, Civil War memory, and Frederick’s skyline all meet.