LA CAPILLA DE SANTA MARIA - HENDERSONVILLE, NC
OUR HISTORY
La Capilla de Santa Maria’s history encompasses the story of a pioneer family, a Civil War veteran, a colorful nineteenth-century evangelical missionary, a pair of dissimilar but devoted brothers, a retired bishop, the first woman priest in the Diocese of Western North Carolina, a one-time illegal immigrant who became first a Roman Catholic and then an Episcopal priest.
La Capilla de Santa Maria’s history encompasses the story of a pioneer family, a Civil War veteran, a colorful nineteenth-century evangelical missionary, a pair of dissimilar but devoted brothers, a retired bishop, the first woman priest in the Diocese of Western North Carolina, a one-time illegal immigrant who became first a Roman Catholic and then an Episcopal priest.
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In the strictest sense, Santa Maria’s history began in the twentieth century, but its true origin can be found in the nineteenth. It is a history bracketed by two waves of immigrants who shared a longing for the
La Capilla during it's construction.
opportunity to realize a better life. Woven together by a common liturgical thread, their stories offer a religious, economic, and demographic study of Henderson County and an example of the cultural blending and adapting that is quint-essentially American.
La Capilla de Santa Maria sits in a grove of trees off US 64 just east of Hendersonville, North Carolina, on land that has belonged to the same family since the early 1800s. The beautiful Gothic Revival chapel is built of stone quarried a few miles away and was consecrated St. Mary’s in 1957. In 1992, it began to be used as a mission where Spanish-language services were offered to Latino immigrants coming from Mexico, Central and South America who worked in Hendersonville County’s agriculture industry, apple orchards and tomato fields. In time, it became home to the first Spanish-speaking parish in the Episcopal Diocese of Western North Carolina.
Mr. Nathan Seagle
Sometimes known as the Seagle Family Chapel, Santa Maria is located not far from the Blue Ridge Escarpment in the Clear Creek community on land that, like most of Henderson County, historians now believe a buffer between the Catawba and Cherokee Nations. The territory was used for hunting and trading before white settlers began advancing into it soon after the Revolutionary War.
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A 1777 treaty reestablished the Eastern Continental Divide as the boundary between the Cherokee Nation and the new United States government. However, in 1785, the State of North Carolina declared land as far west as the Pigeon River, well beyond the boundary, open for settlement. This declaration paved the way for what was, arguably, the first wave of illegal immigrants, as Henderson County historian Jennie Jones Giles once put it. Giles notes that in the mind of those early settlers and according to the state of North Carolina and the nation, they were not illegal, and the Cherokee had
already been pushed farther west. Nevertheless, they were trespassing on land that by treaty belonged to the Cherokee Nation.
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In 1816, thirty-one years after the state opened the area west of the Continental Divide for settlement, Nathan Drake purchased the twenty-five acres in Clear Creek from John Bennett, according to Buncombe County land records. He would have been seventeen or eighteen years old at that time. This tall and reportedly handsome man established the
cemetery at the heart of this story. Drake migrated to Henderson County sometime after 1804. His father John Drake, had died in Lincoln County sometime between 1801 and 1804, based on genealogical research Giles compiled for other Drake descendants. Nathan Drake; his mother, Winifred Massey Drake (listed as Winny Drake); and brother Hezekiah Drake first appeared on local census records in 1810. With the purchase of additional land, Nathan Drake came to own about a thousand acres running from Couch Mountain all the way to today’s US Highway 64. Drake and his wife, Elenor Osborne Drake, carved a home and farm out of that land and raised a sizable family.
La Capilla in 2020.
More than a hundred years later, on about three acres of land set aside for that purpose, Nathan Drake’s grandchildren built St. Mary’s Chapel to honor the wishes of their mother,
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Nathan’s daughter Mary, and their father, Philip Seagle. By the time it was completed, it seemed for a while that the little chapel’s moments had swirled past, leaving it obsolete. But in time, it would be the birthplace of two congregations, one Lutheran and one Episcopalian, and the ecclesiastical home of a new wave of immigrants.