Zion Church, Chintadripet

Zion Church in Chintadripet, Chennai, is a Gothic Protestant church built in 1847 and, according to the historian Muthiah, the oldest church in the city put up by American missionaries. Dr John Scudder and Rev. Miron Winslow, back from Jaffna, began it as a smaller building, and it was sold to the Church Mission Society of London in 1878 for Rs 10,000. Another account dates its founding to 1734 and Governor George Morton Pitt, who settled 230 weaving families beside the Cooum.

Its bell, said to be the second oldest in Chennai, was cast by J Warner and Sons of London, installed in 1878 and restored in 2008. The pipe organ, put in in 1895, was restored by English craftsmen in 2006, and the church itself was rebuilt in 2003. One family supplied its pastors for five generations, from Rev. W. T. Sathianathan in 1862 to Sundar Clarke. It belongs to the Church of South India and keeps a harvest festival each November.