The bell tower of St. James Episcopal Church stood watch over frontier Meeker like a guardian angel. Such symbolic protection may have lent great comfort in this fledgling town, built in 1885 near the White River Indian Agency where agent Nathan Meeker had been killed six years earlier. The Ute Indians who had staged that rebellion (known more infamously as the “Meeker Massacre”) were gone, sent off to Utah reservations, but this was still the Wild West—isolated, unstable, occasionally lawless. Meeker’s settlers confronted those perils with the determination of an army; when they laid the church’s cornerstone in 1889, parish members marched to the site singing “Onward Christian Soldiers.”

One of the first Episcopal churches in the state, St. James was designed by a New York architect and constructed by a master craftsman from Denver; the church bell was imported all the way from Cincinnati. When it opened in December 1890, the church lent Meeker some much-needed structure and a sense of permanence, fostering not only spiritual development but also social organization—a site for community gatherings, celebrations, and classes.

It has served in those roles ever since, without interruption. The building did, however, require some shoring up in the mid-1990s—particularly the bell tower, which had to be straightened and reinforced. It stands tall and upright today, as much a moral and spiritual beacon as it was 112 years ago, when the West was still wild.