The remains of a parish’s decades-old house of worship are buried amid the debris from the thousands of Altadena homes destroyed by the Eaton Fire.
“We have lost everything physical,” stated Pastor Carri Patterson Grindon. “All of our vestments, the things that clergy wear; all of the vessels we use to serve communion; most of our records.”
The community that started coming together generations ago, first as All Saints North Pasadena Mission in 1906 and then again in 1914 as St. Mark’s Parish, includes Grindon, the rector of St. Mark’s Episcopal Church. A year later, they inaugurated their first church, and in 1948, they unveiled the now-charred sanctuary. Between 1958 and 1966, the community added a meeting house, a parish administration building, a preschool, and an elementary school to further enlarge its area.
“Funerals there, weddings, baptisms for decades and decades and decades,” added Grindon.
Grindon and her family had to leave their home when the Eaton Fire broke out last week because the backyard was engulfed in flames.
“We had not been told to evacuate, but the fire was in our backyard,” she continued.
She claimed she was unaware that the fire would destroy entire communities, including her 80-year-old church, in a matter of hours.
As he fled, one of her parishioners saw the church burning.
“He drove by and saw the church burned and the community hall just catching fire with no response because the resources were so thin,” said Grindon.
According to her, the Eaton Fire destroyed forty-five houses in her parish. Grindon’s house and the church preschool somehow survived.
“I learned about my home standing and my spiritual home burning back-to-back,” she stated. “I didn’t believe it.”
The St. Mark’s parish will now meet at their makeshift Eagle Rock church as they work to reconstruct the church they lost.