The effort to restore Abbeville’s Trinity Episcopal Church received a boost recently when Preservation South Carolina was awarded a $125,000 grant from the Watson-Brown Foundation based in Thomson, GA, said Mike Bedenbaugh, Preservation South Carolina president, Tuesday.
Preservation South Carolina has made the restoration of Trinity one of its major projects.
The grant, said Bedenbaugh, “applies to the match for repairs to Trinity’s steeple.
“We are now within only $30,000 of the $700,000 needed to repair the steeple,” he went on to say.
There was more good news on the Trinity front. “We now have our certificate of occupancy,” he said.
This means that the church will be available for occupancy for assemblies of various types, including weddings.
Meanwhile, the Episcopal bishop and diocese will decide when services can be held in the church.
Bedenbaugh said that the hope is that construction for the restoration effort’s Phase Two, which involves finishing work on the steeple, can begin in January and be finished in the spring, “if we raise that $30,000.”
About $670,000 has been raised so far for Phase Two, toward a goal of $700,000.
Trinity church, completed on the eve of the Civil War, is considered by many to be a fine example of Gothic Revival architecture, but it has a number of structural concerns which the restoration effort aims to address.
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