Chapel of the Cross, Chapel Hill, North Carolina - U.S. National Register of Historic Places on Waymarking.com

The Anglican Church was established in Orange County in 1752 when a "chapel of ease" was built at an hilltop crossroads in what would become Chapel Hill to spare remote parishioners a journey to the church in Hillsborough. The small log building disappeared during the American Revolution. The settlement on New Hope Chapel Hill remained and the University of North Carolina was founded here in 1795. Traveling clergy visited, but a permanent Episcopal congregation did not form again for half a century.

In May 1842, the Rev. William Mercer Green, a Professor at the University of North Carolina, presided over the organization of the Church of the Atonement - an Episcopal parish with fifteen communicants and no church building.

The growing congregation worshipped in one another's homes for five years as work on their little church went slowly, using handmade bricks fired in kilns on the Rev. Green’s property. On October 19, 1848, Bishop Levi Silliman Ives consecrated the new church — complete with a wooden gallery for slaves — "The Chapel of the Holy Cross." He described the scale of the building by calling it a chapel, but declared, "We’ll name it for the deed and not the doctrine." In other words, "It's small, but we have big plans." The parish had twenty-two communicants, five of whom were University students.

By 1921, the congregation has outgrown the chapel and a new, larger sanctuary was built next to the chapel. However, services are still conducted in the old chapel. As this is written there was an 8:00 am Sunday service in the original chapel.

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