The Woolen Mills Chapel was built by employees of the Charlottesville Woolen Mills on land donated by the company.  It is a well-preserved example of late-19th-century vernacular church construction with its pointed, Carpenter Gothic doors, windows, shutters, and steeply pitched gable roof. The building’s most distinctive feature is the 50-foot-high octagonal, green shingle-covered bell tower, which gradually tapers to a point. The original 1887 structure, a simple rectangular nave with the tower and vestibule at the south end, was more them doubled in size by the similarly-styled 1908 addition of Sunday school classrooms onto the west side. From 1956 to 1965 the Woolen Mills Chapel was leased to the Pentecostal Holiness Church congregation, and in 1965 it was leased to the Calvary Baptist Church.

The buildings and districts listed under the Charlottesville Multiple Resource Area nomination represent a cross section of all the city’s historic periods, from the founding of Charlottesville in the 1760s through the advent of the automobile and the impact it had on the city’s expansion. Also included are buildings that have played an important part in the history of Charlottesville’s black community. The Woolen Mills Chapel was listed in the registers under the Charlottesville MRA without a formal nomination document.