The history of St. Luke’s began on November 29, 1841 when a group of thirteen citizens gathered in the Pleasant Retreat Academy to form a church.
The deed to the land was transferred on March 2, 1842 from Col. John Hoke to the newly organized parish trustees. Just a week later, a cornerstone was laid, and in July of 1843, the church was consecrated by the Right Reverend Levi Silliman Ives, the second Bishop of the Diocese of North Carolina. St. Luke’s was admitted into the diocese at the convention of 1843 and in 1922 became a part of the Diocese of Western North Carolina.
The churchyard came into use with the building of the church. The earliest group of gravestones date from the 1850s to the 1870s. Two adjoining cast iron fences, dating from the late 1860s, enclose the graves of Major General Stephen Dodson Ramseur (1837 – 1864) and William and Edward Phifer, both of whom died in the Civil War. Ramseur, the youngest Major General in the Confederate Army, was mortally wounded at the Battle of Cedar Creek in Virginia.
Several rows to the east of the Ramseur fence is the monument of William Alexander Hoke (1851 – 1925), who was elected to the North Carolina Supreme Court in 1904 as an associate justice and served as chief justice of North Carolina until his death.
The most important signed monument was created by the well-known marbleyard of J. Baird of Philadelphia. It is the monument of Caroline Rebecca Guion who died in childbirth in 1854. In a shaded corner of the churchyard is a tombstone in the form of a six-legged table that marks the remains of Lorenzo Ferrer (1780-1875), a native of Lyons, France.
