With songs and prayers, Scripture readings, holy water and the smiles and hugs of former classmates, a new alumni center and commemorative Magnolia Plaque were dedicated this weekend on the campus of the former All Saints’ Episcopal School.

The Right Rev. Duncan Gray III, bishop of Mississippi, presided over a Eucharistic service in the All Saints’ chapel, upstairs from the new center.

He then led guests outside for the dedication on the garden patio, which includes bricks inscribed with the names of graduates, and to the plaque mounted in front of the Confederate Avenue school’s signature white pillars and windowed facade.

Since 2009 the All Saints’ campus has been home to the AmeriCorps NCCC Southern Region, and Gray noted the merging of past, present and future in his homily.

In the alumni center, he said, “We are beginning to find the past and the present being brought together… and in the midst of training another group of young people in what it means to have a life of service.”

The service and dedication were part of a day of all-class reunion events which included a dinner dance Saturday night.

All Saints’ operated as a private day- and boarding-school for nearly 100 years before being closed in 2006 by the campus’ owners, the Episcopal Dioceses of Mississippi, Louisiana, Western Louisiana and Arkansas, which in turn leased the property to AmeriCorps.

The center was built with $80,000 donated since the previous all-class reunion two years ago, said events chairman Susan Roberts Price.

Price, a member of the Class of 1972 and a former biology teacher at All Saints’, and her husband, Richard, a Vicksburg native and retired biologist with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers Engineer Research and Development Center, live in the rectory as caretakers.

“With something as significant as the alumni center here, the feeling of this place will live on,” Susan Price said. “Anyone who has passed through these doors has been touched by the spirit of this place. The friendships we’ve made have been lifelong.”

“It means the world (to me),” said Anita Reynolds Padgett, Class of ’56. “I was afraid it was all lost.”

The Magnolia Plaque, given by the Mississippi Department of Archives and History, notes that All Saints’ was established as an Episcopal boarding school for girls in 1901. Offering a high school and two-year college curriculum, the school attracted about 200 students from the United States and abroad. In 1971, boys were admitted.

“Aside from my family, the greatest blessing of my life was my four years here,” said Padgett, who came to Vicksburg as a 13-year-old boarder from Grayson, Ala. “The school’s motto was ‘home, church and school,’ and it was all three of these things — it was a family, with parenting from the headmaster and his wife, there was the religious education we received… and the academic preparation.”

Padgett said the academics were rigorous, since All Saints’ teachers were qualified to teach at the junior college level.

Susan Price said 150 alumni and their guests and former faculty members attended the weekend reunion, dedication and festivities.

Since 2009, more than 300 AmeriCorps members have lived on the campus and given a year to community service, including this year’s group of 80 volunteers, said Gary Turner, Southern regional director for AmeriCorps NCCC.

Members are trained in service and leadership, embrace diversity and work to meet the unique needs of the Southern region, which this year have included cleaning up after the 2011 Mississippi River Flood, tornadoes in Arkansas and Alabama and wildfires in South Carolina.

“The All Saints’ Episcopal School vision of excellence in education and training students for a lifetime of service lives on,” Turner said. “We hope we can continue to make you proud.”