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Just south of Columbia, on a stretch of land where four Polk family plantations once met, stands a small stone church that few outside Maury County have ever heard of. St. John's Episcopal Church was never meant to be a landmark. It was built to be a family's chapel. It became something much larger than that.

The church was the vision of Leonidas Polk, a cousin of President James K. Polk, who trained for the ministry after graduating from West Point and rose to become the Episcopal Church's Missionary Bishop of the Southwest. Between 1839 and 1842, Leonidas and his three brothers, George, Lucius, and Rufus, built the church on a corner of land where their four plantations converged, dividing the cost the same way they had divided their father's original land grant. Leonidas drew the plans himself and oversaw construction, using stone and timber gathered from the surrounding plantations.

The people who actually built St. John's were enslaved men and women owned by the Polk family. It is a detail easy to leave out of a story about a bishop and his brothers, and it should not be. The chapel that still stands today exists because of hands that never chose to be there.

The church was meant to serve the Polk households, the people they enslaved, and their neighbors alike. That arrangement held until war reached Ashwood. On March 31, 1862, Union troops under Gen. Don Carlos Buell ransacked the building. By 1864, it had been converted into a Confederate hospital. That same year, Leonidas Polk, who had left the pulpit to become a Confederate general, was killed in battle near Marietta, Georgia.

Services at St. John's continued after the war but dwindled for decades until they stopped altogether in 1915. The church itself remains standing today, closed to regular worship, opened once a year for a pilgrimage that keeps its story from disappearing entirely.