Calvary Episcopal Church was built during the ministry of the Reverend Joseph Blount Cheshire in the stormy years between 1859-1868. The architect, William Percival, originally proposed that the exterior of the building be of stucco over brick and that the towers be of wood. In the final plan the brick exterior was left bare, brick was used in the towers, buttresses were added, and the church was lengthened by one bay.

A search for earlier Episcopal endeavor in Edgecombe County would yield little. The original Church of England parish in the County, St. Mary’s, was located eight miles northeast of Tarboro and was fairly large considering the small size of the community. The parish church was finished about 1749. Today not a trace remains of St. Mary’s. Its register was burnt as wastepaper and the congregation was attracted to a new wooden church in the newly incorporated Town of Tarboro. This new church (c. 1760) is thought to have been built on land now belonging to Howard Memorial Presbyterian Church.

With the upheaval of the Revolutionary War, the Church of England was virtually outlawed. No established church of the Anglican type filled the vacuum, so church buildings crumbled and congregations dispersed, either to other Protestant denominations or to wait out years bereft of spiritual leadership. Finally in 1784 Samuel Seabury was consecrated Bishop of the Episcopal Church in America, but not until 1819 was the congregation of Trinity Church formed in Tarboro by the Reverend John Phillips. His ministry covered the area between Raleigh and Washington, N.C., and by 1822 his communicants had dwindled in number from ten to four.

By 1833 the Church had begun to grow. In this year the Congregation of Calvary Church incorporated, formed a vestry, and called a minister. In 1834 Town Lot No. 44 was granted to the Vestry by a trust left by an eighteenth century clergyman, the Reverend Henry John Burgess. On this lot, the southern part of the present Churchyard, a small frame church was built in 1840.

Backtrack and turn west, to pass the grave of William Dorsey Pender, the youngest general in the Confederate Army, killed in action at age 29. His grave is arrayed with cannon balls. Near him lies buried his kinsman, Col. John T. Mercer of the 21st Georgia Chargers. Towering above these graves are incense cedars and hemlocks, and near the south door of the Church are a pair of silver firs, very rare to this area.

Near the south gate of the Churchyard is the headstone of Col. William Lawrence Saunders, who collected and compiled the colonial records of North Carolina and whose courage under interrogation is recorded by the inscription, "I decline to answer." Camellias, azaleas, sweetholly, and boxwood fill the southwest quadrant, and the main path to the Church is guarded by two ancient trees, an incense cedar and a live oak. To the south of the path are the memorials to Joseph Blount Cheshire, and to his son, the Bishop of North Carolina. Farther down in the southwest corner are the graves of Bertram Brown, a beloved rector of the Church, and of Henry Toole Clark, first president of the William Dorsey Pender Chapter of the U. D. C.

The large northwest quadrant is filled with elaborate Victorian memorials, and against the west wall of the cloister is a large plot of ivy with few markers. This was the servants’ plot, as attested by several stones with tender sentiments. In this quadrant are many interesting trees, Lebanon cedar, Chinese hawthorns, a magnolia macrophylla which sheds enormous leaves, osage orange, and ginko, and near All Saints’ Chapel, the children’s favorite, a buckeye.