The interior of the Episcopal Church Archives, as seen in a design rendering, will include a new reading room for the church’s archival materials. Photo: The Episcopal Church
[Episcopal News Service] The Episcopal Church is breaking ground this week on a new facility to house its archival collections, on a 3.5-acre property in Oakwood, Georgia, that was the former home of the Diocese of Atlanta’s St. Gabriel’s Episcopal Church.
Site preparation work was scheduled to begin June 22 on renovations of the former St. Gabriel’s building and an expansion project that will turn the site into the first permanent home for The Episcopal Church Archives since 2021. The $4.5 million project is expected to be completed by spring 2027.
The Episcopal Church Archives preserves documents and artifacts detailing centuries’ worth of church history. For the past five years, the archives have occupied a temporary warehouse in Austin, Texas. The church previously had leased space from the Seminary of the Southwest for 60 years.
The new facility in Oakwood, about 45 minutes from Atlanta, will include offices, a reading room and 75% more storage space than the current facility in Austin, Lawrence Hitt II, an Executive Council member from the Diocese of Colorado, told other members of the church governing body at its meeting last week. Hitt, who chairs Executive Council’s Governance & Operations Committee, also leads the church’s Archives Advisory Committee.
The project is the culmination of a 20-year effort to find a new home for The Episcopal Church Archives. Its collections include letters, diaries, photographs, motion pictures, plans, maps, certificates of ordination, journals of every diocese, various periodicals and magazines, church newspapers, paintings and parish histories.
General Convention first passed a resolution in 2006 initiating the search. Early plans involved building a new facility on a property the church purchased in Austin, but in 2018, the church chose instead to sell the undeveloped lot and make a temporary move into leased warehouse space.
In January 2024, Executive Council authorized negotiations for a potential long-term lease of space at the DeKoven Center in Racine, Wisconsin, but later that year, church leaders broadened their scope to research a range of potential sites for consideration.
In June 2025, the church announced it had chosen the property in the Diocese of Atlanta as the new site. It had been vacant since the former St. Gabriel’s Church had ceased operations in October 2023.