St. Matthias Episcopal Church

1 Dundee St, Asheville, NC 28801

James Vester Miller and his new construction company built this building when Miller was a young man in his thirties, and it helped launch his extraordinary career. Thought to be Asheville’s oldest African-American congregation, the congregation first met as The Freedmen’s Church within Trinity Episcopal Church. It later moved to a frame building, where the first school providing formal education for Asheville’s Black community began meeting in 1870. The need for a larger building led to the construction of the current Gothic Revival building, renamed St. Matthias Episcopal Church.