Iowa) Christ Church Episcopal (Burlington

Christ Episcopal Church of Burlington, Iowa, traces its beginnings to the early settlement era of the Upper Mississippi Valley. According to the church’s history, Bishop Jackson Kemper arrived in the area in 1836, and by 1838 Burlington had been adopted by the Episcopal Church as a missionary station. The first recorded service for the mission was held on March 15, 1839, in Old Zion, which was then the only religious building in Burlington.

The congregation was formally organized as a parish by 1840. In 1847 it adopted the name Christ Church and secured land for its first church building at Fifth and High Streets. As Burlington expanded, the parish did too, and after the Civil War the congregation eventually replaced its earlier structure with the stone church that was occupied in 1885 and consecrated on May 16, 1886.

Today, the church is remembered both for its local religious life and for its place in the early history of Burlington and territorial Iowa. Its roots in missionary work, frontier settlement, and long community service make it an especially vivid example of how Episcopal congregations helped shape civic and spiritual life in the nineteenth-century Midwest.