However, it was not until Mr. Edward Gendron Pa1mer fitted up a house on what is now Palmer Street in Ridgeway, in 1841, that the Ridgeway Episcopalians had a place to worship. This is the homesite of the late Robert Charlton Thomas, now the home of Mr. John Jones.
The widow of Doctor James Davis, Mrs. Catherine Ross Davis, who had moved to Ridgeway and built IVEY HILL (the site of the Ridgeway Public School) after tlZe death of her husband in Columbia in order to he near her daughter, Mrs. Edward G. Palmer, gave in the early 1850's ten acres of land on which Saint Stephen's Chapel was built. Bisllop Davis consecrated Saint Stephen's on August 4, 1854, as a chapel of Saint John's Parish, Winnsboro The two Fairfield Episcopal churches had taken the names of low country parishes whence so many of their earliest members had migrated to Fairfield.
The earliest members of Saint Stephen's, in addition Davis's, Palmer, and Thomas families, were the Peays and Meyers of Longtown and the Machettes of Dutchman's Creek. This marked the first of the German Lutherans in the area, some who became Episcopalians, as had the French Huguenots,. such as the Gaillards and Couturiers, in the lowcountry.
One of the really great figures in the Episcopal Church of America. Reverend William Porcher DuBose, a native of Fairfield County, served Saint Stephen's, Ridgeway, and Saint John's, Winnsboro, as rector immediately after the War, upon his return to his native state, from 1865 to 1868. Later, at the University of the South, Sewanee, as dean, chaplain, and professor, for the remaining years of his long and fruitful life, Dr. DuBosc through many writings became a world figure in tile realm of philosophy and religion. He was called by English scholars "the wisest man on both sides of the Atlantic."
In more than forty years on the faculty of Sewanee, Dr. DuBose came to represent the Spirit of Sewanee, and to generations of students he became the Sage of Sewanee, revered by all who came under his quiet but powerful influence.
It is no singular coincidence that Fairfield County, with its, rich religous and educational background of Scotch-Irish Presbyterians and Mount Zion College, its low country English and French Huguenots in Saint John's and Saint Stephen's Episcopal Churches, its historic Methodism, and as the birthplace of the Associate Reformed Presbyterian Church, has given so many leaders to religion and education in the state, the South, and the nation. In its early years Mount Zion supplied the vast bulk of educated men to the Presbyterian ministry; and both Wofford College and South Carolina Methodism's great James Henry Carlisle, and Sewanee and the Episcopal Church's scholoarly William Porter DuBoxe studied and later taught at Mount Zion, were both natives of natives Fairfield County.
The little church St. Stephen's that was built in 1854 is the oldest and one of the most beautifil land marks at Ridgeway. It is a pictureque building, characterized by a steep gabled roof, giving it the appearance of an ancient Gothic chapel. Handsom stained-glass windows, deepset in narrow Gothic arches, further dramatize the architecture. The church was orginally a frame structure, painted red. In the 1920's it was brick venneered, and in the 1940's a win containing the parich hous and Church School was added, enhancing, rather than dtracting from, the orignal design.
The grounds consist of a well-kept cemetery, dotted with tombstones and graves bearing the names of the builders and early families. The churchyard is enclosed with a handsome wrought-iron fence and sturdy gateways.
