Although Quakers were Muncy's first settlers, Episcopalians had become the town's elite by the middle of the nineteenth century. Formed in 1819, the congregation worshipped in Emanuel Lutheran Church and a schoolhouse until 1832 when the first St. James Church was erected on this site. In the early 1850s a larger brick building was proposed, but parishioner Susan Hall approached the Reverend John Henry Hopkins Jr., a childhood friend and the publisher of the New York–based Church Journal, who persuaded his friend Richard M. Upjohn to give St. James a set of plans. Built of Muncy sandstone in random sizes, the church is a good example of Upjohn's understated design: a steeply gabled rectangular box with a square corner tower that rises in three stages
The adjacent one-story parish house was built in 1856 from bricks salvaged from the original church. Resembling a Gothic Revival chapel, it is a hall with one large room and a twentieth-century kitchen addition to the rear. Behind the church at 210 S. Washington Street is its three-story brick rectory (1856), a well-proportioned and simply detailed Greek Revival building. Its Tuscan-columned front porch was added in the early twentieth century.