St. James Catholic Church is hard to miss on the Route 1 corridor and its history is also worth a look.

Completed in 1926, the large Romanesque church at 3700 Rhode Island Ave. in Mount Rainier was built out of brick and stone on a steel skeleton in a grand style common to Catholic churches of that era.

Separate buildings added later for a school, rectory and convent nearby add to the church complex, giving it a major presence along Route 1.

The church got its start in 1908 as a mission of St. Francis de Sales, the oldest continuous congregation in D.C., with a complicated history dating back to the 1700s.

Like other Catholic churches on the Route 1 corridor, St. James flourished for decades due to its proximity to Catholic University in Brookland, but saw a decline in attendance by the 1970s due to changes in the area’s demographics.

In 2004, the church was taken over by priests from the Institute of the Incarnate Word, a conservative Catholic institute started in Argentina in 1984, and it has since grown due to outreach to Central American immigrants, Filipinos and younger families in the area.

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