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Looking Back: Cramond-on-Chattahoochee with an Iona style

From August 1984


A replica of Cramond Kirk, Edinburgh, may be built near Atlanta, Georgia, as part of an ‘Iona Conference Centre’. It would serve as the centre’s chapel.

The plan has had the approval of the Edinburgh church, whose minister, the Rev Campbell Maclean, told the congregation that they should regard “imitation as the sincerest form of flattery”. Detailed plans have been prepared by a Cramond elder who is also an architect, Mr Tom Gray. The final decision on whether to go ahead will rest with the American sponsors of the project and the authorities at Roswell, for whom a planning application has been prepared.

In an application, for which Mr Gray has prepared design plans, the chief American backer, Mr Horace P. Holden, says that the aim is to ‘construct a conference centre and hospice involving the concepts of the Iona Community’. The aim is to integrate the chapel, built as a replica of Cramond Kirk, and other new buildings, with a recreational centre which has been in existence since 1961. The site is described as an attractive one and “the outlook over the Chattahoochee River is superb”. Crammond itself looks out over the River Almond and the Firth of Forth.

Mr Holden says that his work combines “three loves” – of outdoor recreation, of the Church, and of working and helping people. He is an American graduate who later studied at Edinburgh University and took a Master’s degree at Union Theological Seminary, New York. He began to operate a ‘daycamp’ in 1961 and lives nearby.

There is also a plan to erect an ‘Iona Cross’.

Amenities shown on present plans of the site include tennis courts, picnic places, swimming pools, a ‘canoe launch’, a gymnasium, and a soccer pitch.


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