As you can see from the photo leading off the post, the church has a non-traditional building at the corner of Main and Spring streets — and is directly across Main from Fuquay Mineral Spring Park, which is where people began to visit in the 19th century after receiving word of the spring water’s healing powers.
I’m not providing a link to a gallery of photos that I shot at this church because the four pictures in this post represent the full extent of the shoot.
As you can see in the lead-off photo, low-hanging cables dissect the heart of the church from this straight-on vantage point, which I assessed to be, shortly after I arrived, the best way to capture the church’s very modest campus at 105 N. West St. I probably could have tried to get rid of the cables with my healing tool in editing software, but I’ve failed more often than succeeded when the wires were this involved with the photo subject.
However, I maneuvered closer to avoid the cables for the first three photos below, and in the case of the fourth photo below, I did dare to use my editing healing tool to remove the wires — with pretty decent success … except for the shadow.
For a full gallery of images from this shoot, follow the link in this sentence.
In the “About” tab at its church website (see link in previous sentence), the Fuquay-Varina church provides a very nice display of photos of church members and staff and a biography of its current pastor, Rev. Gyasi Patterson.
The primary challenge I had when photographing this church were the utility cables (a common nemesis of photographers!). I either danced around them or used a healing tool on my editing software to remove them.
To view a full gallery of images from this shoot, follow the link in this sentence.
This was years before Fuquay-Varina experienced a significant development spurt as the population and suburban reach of state capital Raleigh expanded in all directions. Twenty years later in 1987, when serious growth started happening in the southern Wake County community, St. Mary’s pastor, Rev. Albert Todd, started celebrating weekly Mass in Spanish and English in leased space at Trinity Episcopal in F-V.
Within 20 years after Rev. Todd’s efforts to celebrate Mass at Trinity Episcopal, the F-V mission congregation had been gifted 10 acres of land and $100,000 anonymously to embark on its first building campaign. In 1990, it dedicated a parish hall and, in 2001, its first sanctuary at 1005 Wilbon Road.
Still, it wasn’t until 2004 that the congregation ceased being a mission church of St. Mary’s and became an independent parish. But by then, the size of the congregation had outgrown its physical plant. So a new capital fund-raising campaign began, and by 2009, St. Bernadette had opened a new John Paul II Learning Center, and in the following year, expanded its sanctuary to accommodate more people.
The online history was kind enough to credit parishioner and longtime Fuquay-Varina teacher Myrtle S. Hopson for her donation of the land for the church facilities in the late 1980s and, after her death in September 2001, identifying her as the anonymous $100,000 donor to the initial building campaign, conditional on the church raising an additional $50,000 from parish members.
When I contacted the church recently about doing a photo profile of the campus grounds, I was told that the parish would soon be remodeling its interior, and I was asked to hold off planning to get interior photos. But I was invited to photograph the exterior, which is what I did on Thursday. A full gallery of images from the shoot can be found at the link in this sentence.
While in Fuquay-Varina, I stopped at four other churches and took pictures of those, too. They will be presented here in the days ahead.
