The Reverend George Darley, a skilled carpenter, built his own church and an adjacent two-story manse to help keep succeeding Presbyterian ministers happy in isolated Lake City. The white clapboard church with pedimented lintels was a typical country church until 1882, when its vernacular Second Empire tower was added. This 60-foot bell tower has shingles and eight lancet louvers beneath a graceful, soaring spire. The original side doors of the tower base could not accommodate funeral caskets and had to be augmented by a double central door. Darley, Colorado's most prominent pioneer Presbyterian minister, published an autobiography, Pioneering in the San Juans (1899). His brother Alex, also a minister, guided this church through the 1880s. The oldest church on the Western Slope retains its original pews and pulpit, illuminated by newer, stained glass windows.
The clapboard L-shaped manse (1879, George Darley), 429 Gunnison Avenue (southwest corner of 5th Street), is likewise an exercise in vernacular Second Empire detailing with its pedimented and bracketed lintels, double windows, and double quatre-foil cutout in the front gable end. Darley's painstaking carpentry paid off: ministers have lived here to this day. Darley also built a Presbyterian church in Ouray and another in Del Norte, where he also worked to build the Presbyterian College of the Southwest.