St. Mark's Episcopal Church has watched San Antonio grow from a frontier town into a modern American city since its consecration in 1859. The congregation that built St. Mark's was established in 1850, just five years after the United States annexed Texas, by Anglo-American settlers who had arrived with the wave of immigration that followed the Mexican-American War. The first services were held in makeshift quarters.
By 1858, the congregation had raised sufficient funds to begin construction of this permanent building, designed by noted New York architect Richard Upjohn Jr. in the English Gothic style that was then fashionable for American Episcopal churches. The thick limestone walls, pointed arch windows, and simple stone tower create an atmosphere of dignified solemnity that has remained essentially unchanged for 165 years. During the Civil War, when San Antonio was occupied by Confederate sympathizers and later by Union forces, St. Mark's served a congregation divided in its loyalties.
During Reconstruction, the church navigated the difficult political and social landscape of a city that was neither fully Southern nor fully Western. Today St. Mark's remains an active downtown parish with a distinguished music program — its pipe organ, installed in the twentieth century, fills the stone nave with sound that echoes off walls that have heard every chapter of modern San Antonio.