St. Luke's Episcopal Church
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The history of St. Luke's began on the night of November 29, 1841 when a group of thirteen citizens of Lincolnton gathered in the Pleasant Retreat Academy and formed a congregation to be known as St. Luke's Church. The deed to the land was transferred on March 2, 1842 from Col. John Hoke to the trustees of St. Luke's Church. One week later, on March 9, the cornerstone of the first church was laid. The church was consecrated on July 29, 1843 by the Right Reverend Levi Silliman Ives, the second Bishop of the Diocese of North Carolina. St. Luke's was admitted into the diocese at the convention of 1843 and became a part of the Diocese of Western North Carolina in 1922.
St. Luke's historic churchyard came into use with the building of the church in 1842. The earliest group of gravestones date from the 1850s to the 1870s. There are two adjoining cast iron fences which date from the late 1860s and enclose the graves of Major General Stephen Dodson Ramseur (1837-1864) and William (d. 1863) and Edward (d. 1864) Phifer, all of whom died in the Civil War while fighting for the Confederacy. Ramseur, the youngest Major General in the Confederate Army was mortally wounded and died at the age of 27 after the Battle of Cedar Creek in Virginia. The white marble obelisk of General Ramseur's grave was damaged during Hurricane Hugo in 1989. A replica of the obelisk, by Wiley Brothers, was erected at the grave in 1991. Several rows to the east of the Ramseur fence is the grave of William Alexander Hoke (1851-1925), who was elected to the North Carolina Supreme Court in 1904 as an associate justice and served as chief justice of North Carolina until 1925. In a corner of the churchyard, at the church's west, rear elevation, is a monument in the form of a six-legged table that marks the remains of Lorenzo Ferrer (1780-1875), a native of Lyons, France.
There is a group of signed stones dating from 1850 to 1881. The most important signed monument was created at the well-known marble yard of J. Baird, Philadelphia, who supplied gravestones for elite members of North Carolina society in the antebellum period. It is the monument for Caroline Rebecca Guion who died in childbirth in 1854. The tomb is surmounted by an obelisk that reads "Caroline Rebecca, Guion, and her Babe". Carved into an oval on the west side of Guion's monument is a recumbent figure that is summoned to heaven by an angel in the form of a winged babe and inscribed "and they departed together on the 11th of September 1843".
