A gilded hand with its index finger raised, in place of a cross, tops the steeple of the First Presbyterian Church of Port Gibson, a brick church completed in 1860. The hand honors Zebulon Butler, the congregation's minister for more than three decades, who was known for raising his fist with an index finger jabbing toward heaven as he preached. Butler urged the congregation to build the church and died on December 23, 1860, a week after it was dedicated. The first hand was carved of wood and covered in gold leaf, and accounts date it to 1859 or to just after his death. The present hand is metal and went up around the turn of the twentieth century, with accounts putting it between about 1900 and 1903, and one tradition blames woodpeckers for the end of the wooden original.
The hand stands about ten feet tall and weighs 200 to 250 pounds by different accounts. It was taken down for repair in 1989, and again on June 26, 2017, when it was sent to Virginia to be stripped and repaired and then covered again in gold leaf by a gilders' studio in Maryland. A crane lifted it back on August 16, 2017, to stand about 147 feet above the ground.
The congregation traces its origins to the Bayou Pierre Church, organized in 1807 a few miles west of Port Gibson, and moved into the town in the late 1820s, when Butler became its minister. The Romanesque Revival building is credited to James Jones. Port Gibson is also the town that, by local tradition, Ulysses S. Grant called too beautiful to burn.
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31.9597, -90.9818
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