Houston architects Salisbury and McHale were known primarily for their houses until they ventured into the design of Episcopal, Roman Catholic, and Lutheran churches beginning in the mid-1930s. This former church was one of their early religious commissions. Although it was designed in an American colonial style rather than the suburban neo-Gothic with which Salisbury and McHale became identified, St. James possesses the domestic scale, refined but economical historical detail, and reassuringly familiar ambiance that made them such sought-after church architects in the 1940s and 1950s. The parish forsook old Conroe for the suburbs in the 1970s, but as the chapel of Conroe Funeral Home, St. James has retained its graceful place in the rolling green landscape of Conroe's north-side neighborhood.