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A view of the Open Door Evangelistic Center on Market Street from its front


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The chapel is done in the victorian style, it is 2 1/2 stories high and a well preserved example of late nineteenth century vernacular church construction. There are pointed carpenter Gothic doors, windows, shutters, and a steeply pitched gable roof. The very noticeable shingle-covered bell tower is 50 feet high, octagonal and green, and it gradually tapers as it goes up. There are white-painted horizontal weatherboards and the chapel is topped by a standing-seam tin roof.  Spurred on by a religious movement in Charlottesville during 1886, the community of Woolen Mills erected the Woolen Mills Chapel in its entirety in 1887, and had it consecrated on May 13, 1888. H. C. Marchant, the founder and president of the Woolen Mills deeded the lot of land used for the church to the area on August 23, 1887, and later, in 1891 the Trustees of the Woolen Mills Chapel received the adjoining lot, which they used to build an addition to the chapel in 1908. The original structure consisted of a rectangular nave with the tower and vestibule at the south end. The 1908 addition included sunday school classrooms on the west side and almost doubled the size of the original structure. The Boyd and Wash of Charlottesville headed up the original construction as contractors and most of the construction was done by workers of Woolen Mills. The area of Woolen Mills used the chapel for non-denominational purposes in the beginning, and since that time, the chapel has housed the Pentecostal Holiness Congregation (from 1956-1965) and the Calvary Baptist Church (since 1965).  Received by the Albemarle Charlottesville Historical Society on February 23, 1995 from the sister of the photographer, Miss Evelina Magruder, in a two volume collection of photos, known as the Alaville Magruder Collection.


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