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The saga of an historic Palo Alto church building will be recounted Sunday by a woman who fought for more than two decades to save it from demolition.

Ruth Anne Gray, whose grandfather was a co-founder of the African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AME Zion) church, will recount the church's history from its original construction in the mid-1920s to its current restoration.

The building is on Ramona Street between Homer and Channing avenues near downtown Palo Alto.

The talk will be Sunday (May 3) at 2 p.m. at the Lucie Stern Community Center, 1305 Middlefield Road, Palo Alto, sponsored by the Palo Alto Historical Association.

The church was the first African-American church between San Mateo and San Jose when it was built in 1924-25, for a reported cost of about $6,000.

During the Great Depression, a community-based fundraising effort paid off the mortgage when the church was threatened with foreclosure. Funds came from white churches and residents in Palo Alto as well as from the Japanese Methodist Church in Palo Alto, which contributed $500.

Former Palo Alto Times co-publisher Dallas Wood challenged in his columns that if the church would raise half the mortgage he would organize a community campaign to raise the other half.

In 1965, the church was sold to the Palo Alto Medical Research Foundation, funds from which helped the congregation build a new, larger church on Middlefield Road in Palo Alto. The church building was used for many years for research storage, then threatened with demolition in the 1980s when the Palo Alto Medical Foundation was contemplating rebuilding on the site.

It currently is owned by Menlo Equities, a Palo Alto firm that is seeking to lease the renovated building for office use, according to leasing agent Jane Vaughan, who opened the building for Gray to visit Thursday morning.