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Ebenezer Baptist Church, located at 407-413 Auburn Avenue, is part of a tradition of church building that existed in the Sweet Auburn community in the first decades of the twentieth century. Big Bethel A.M.E. Church of 1904 and 1924, located at 220 Auburn Avenue,
Wheat Street Baptist Church of 1920-1923, located at 365 Auburn Avenue, and Ebenezer of 1914-1922, are substantial buildings erected by a prosperous black community and built in the popular styles of their day. That these buildings soar above Auburn Avenue suggests both their spiritual importance and their place in the early twentieth century Sweet Auburn skyline.
Creator: U.S. Department of the Interior, National Park Service, Historic American Buildings Survey. Source: U.S. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division "Built in America" Collection, reproduction number HABS GA-2169-F. Copyright: "The records in HABS/HAER were created for the U.S. Government and are considered to be in the public domain.
Ebenezer was designed in the Gothic Revival style of architecture. Popular in the United States as a residential style from 1840-1880, Gothic Revival remained a common choice for ecclesiastical buildings well into the twentieth century. Although Gothic forms never completely disappeared in English church architecture, Gothic reemerged as a style of architecture during the middle of the eighteenth century with the work of William Kent and Horace Walpole.
Nearly a century later, it was promoted in the United States by Alexander Jackson Davis. Its popularity increased, however, through the work of Andrew Jackson Downing, whose pattern books, Cottage Residences, Rural Architecture and Landscape Gardening of 1842 and The Architecture of Country Houses of 1850, circulated widely.
Lyndhurst, the Tarrytown, New York residence designed by Davis in 1838 and 1865, and Richard Upjohn's Trinity Church in New York City of 1839-1846 are among the most influential buildings of the period and include such elements as pointed-arched window openings, wall buttresses, towers, castellated parapets, and steeply pitched roofs. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, Upjohn's archeological approach to church design gave way to more eclectic church buildings. Later Gothic Revival churches include both traditional Gothic design elements, elements borrowed from other styles, and original motifs.
Ebenezer is a two-story, rectangular brick church with two large towers at each end of the Auburn Avenue facade (photograph 24). These towers flank a steeply pitched gable roof that contains two pairs of cross gables. The southernmost pair corresponds to a transept and contains a large, three-part Gothic window in each gable end. The brickwork at the lower level is covered with gray stucco and scored to resemble stone.
The main facade is essentially divided into three bays. The towers, which comprise the two outer bays, are buttressed at the first and second levels and contain stained glass and louvered lancet windows. Merlons are located in the corners of the tower parapets. The center bay contains the main entrance at ground level, three narrow, stained-glass windows at the second level, and a three-part Gothic window in the gable end.
Two-story buttresses divide the side elevations into nine bays, with the tower comprising the northernmost bay and the chancel expressed in the southernmost bay. These bays are punctuated at the lower level by segmental-arched windows with the second-floor bays marked by tall, stained-glass windows. Brick panels mark the division between the first and second floors.
The rear elevation has been largely obscured by a one-story, hip-roofed addition built in 1971. An oculus, located high in the gable end, remains visible. The two-story Education Building, constructed in 1956 and rehabilitated in 1971, similarly obscures the east elevation. Brick beltcourses, panels, corbels, and window hoods ornament the front and side elevations of Ebenezer and to a lesser extent the Education Building. Brick ornamentation of this type is common in public and commercial buildings throughout the Sweet Auburn community from the early part of the twentieth century through the 1930s.
The church auditorium is located at the second level, above the below-grade meeting hall. It is an open, rectangular space, with the pulpit and choir elevated on a platform and a balcony across the rear of the sanctuary. The walls are white plaster, and the pitched ceiling is pressed metal, also painted white. The gently sloped floor is oak and contains a central and two narrower side ranks of pews. Transepts feature stained glass portraits of Rev. A. D. Williams and Rev. Martin Luther King, Sr. Martin Luther King, Jr. NHS: Historic Resource Study.