The life-sized Crucifix that hangs from the rood beam above the chancel steps consists of a seven-and-a-half foot cross made of cherry and a four-foot corpus carved from lindenwood. The sculptor was George Stone Saussy, a devout Episcopalian whose grandson John Hampton Saussy is an active member of Good Shepherd. George Saussy was an architectural draftsman for Standard Oil until his retirement in the late 1950s, when he enrolled in an art class at the Columbia Museum of Art. He did not consider himself a professional artist, yet his carving was flawless and mostly for churches. In early 1960, he and his wife moved to Highlands, North Carolina, where he carved the Good Shepherd Crucifix. Hampton Saussy relates that his grandfather and his father, David Saussy, brought the crucifix from Highlands to Columbia wrapped in a sheet in his father’s Rambler station wagon. Eventually, he developed such severe cataracts he could hardly see; one Sunday morning while he was waiting for his wife to get dressed for church, he decided he would finish cleaning his shop. When his wife called him in, he did not answer. She went outside to check on him and found him squatted down in the carport with a last piece of wood from the shop in his hands. He suffered a massive heart attack and died September 27, 1964. In Good Shepherd’s Memorials Book it is entered: “Crucifix on the rood beam, given by Mrs. and Mrs. Thomas H. Allen, September 7, 1964, in loving memory of her father, Dr. Lewis N. Taylor.” (Taken from an article by Beatrice Rose (Mrs. William Harrison Rose) in The Piedmont Churchman)