An East-of-the-River View

—Anacostia Heritage Trail —

Across This Intersection is St. Teresa of Avila, the first Catholic Church east of the Anacostia River. It is called the "mother church" because many area congregations are its offshoots.

As Uniontown grew, so did its Catholic population. In 1879 James Cardinal Gibbons, Archbishop of Baltimore, established St. Teresa's Parish. Although racially mixed, St. Teresa's relegated its African American members to the back of the church they had helped build. In 1911 the black parishioners petitioned Cardinal Gibbons for a new parish to serve their needs. While fundraising to build a church of their own, parishioners met in homes and St. Teresa's basement. In 1918 Cardinal Gibbons granted their petition. The parish men volunteered nights and weekends to build the new Our Lady of Perpetual Help Church on Morris Road near Fort Stanton. It opened in 1921.

For decades black and white Catholics here led separate existences. Nancy Puglisi, a white elementary student at St. Teresa's School during the early 1950s, remembers going with her class to Our Lady of Perpetual Help's annual bazaar. "We'd be told to bring a quarter to buy something. Other than that, blacks and whites never socialized" By the 1970s, with the neighborhood's racial change, St. Teresa's was predominantly black, too.

Our Lady of Perpetual
Help is famous for the views from its Panorama Room, which has hosted everything from church bazaars to cabarets and Go-Go concerts.

The row of eight frame Italianate houses behind you was built in 1889 by brothers William and James Yost. The stone church on this corner originally housed Emmanuel Episcopal Church, the mother church to St. Philip the Evangelist.

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