The building was designed by architect Benjamin C. Flournoy of Baltimore, Maryland, and completed in March 1929.

Several residents of the city sent a petition to the Virginia synod of the Presbyterian Church in the United States (commonly described as the Southern Presbyterian Church), asking them to send an evangelist to the city for the purpose of organizing a new congregation.

[1] The group began meeting and worshipping together in December 1902,[2] and the congregation formally organized on January 25, 1903, as the Second Presbyterian Church South (a.k.a.

Bedinger served as the first pastor, Dr. Otho M. Muncster and E. H. Cumpston as the first elders, and Dr. George DuBose, James J. Royster, and William S. Feland the first deacons.

Pratt resigned in the fall of 1910 to take a position as pastor of a Southern Presbyterian Church congregation in Abbeville, South Carolina.

Bird asked his congregation to donate their manual labor to the expansion effort.

Bird began traveling extensively throughout the Deep South to raise funds for a new church building.

[11] The nine-year fundraising campaign culminated in 1927, with more than $200,000 ($3,500,000 in 2023 dollars) in donations from congregations throughout the Deep South.

[16] The church used a portion of the funds to purchase a large lot just south of its existing structure.

Flournoy designed a complex that included a church, a Sunday School building, and a parsonage.

The three structures were arranged to mimic the layout of a medieval abbey,[16] and resemble Late English Gothic architecture.

Among the donations raised at this time was a pledge by Sarah Ecker Watts Morrison, wife of Governor Cameron A. Morrison of North Carolina, to donate a $20,000 ($400,000 in 2023 dollars) pipe organ to the finished church.

Dr. John B. Frazier, a Southern Presbyterian minister and former chief chaplain in the United States Navy, conducted much of this fundraising,[20] emphasizing that the Church of the Pilgrims was going to be a gift to the nation from the Southern Presbyterian Church.

Bird repeatedly called for members of the church to donate their manual labor in constructing the edifice.

On July 30, 1928, Bird and other members of the congregation actually dug a trench for the foundation of an arch on the property.