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Beth Salem Presbyterian Church

Churches in McMinn County, TennesseeChurches on the National Register of Historic Places in TennesseeNational Register of Historic Places in McMinn County, TennesseePresbyterian churches in TennesseeVernacular architecture in Tennessee
Beth Salem Presbyterian Church tn1
Beth Salem Presbyterian Church tn1

Beth Salem Presbyterian Church is a historic African-American church in Athens, Tennessee. The congregation was organized in 1866 with support from white missionaries, making Beth Salem the first African American church in the three-county farming region of McMinn, Meigs, and Polk counties.At first, the congregation held its services under a brush arbor. After a local white woman donated land for a building, a log church was built. It also housed a public school. After the log building was destroyed by fire around 1920, the current building was built using donated lumber and the volunteer labor of both black church members and their white neighbors.The 1920 church building is a one-story, one-room, rectangular frame structure with a gable front entrance, weatherboard siding, and a metal roof. It typifies a vernacular architectural tradition common in rural African-American churches during the Jim Crow era. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2000.

Excerpt from the Wikipedia article Beth Salem Presbyterian Church (License: CC BY-SA 3.0, Authors, Images).

Beth Salem Presbyterian Church
County Road 602,

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Geographical coordinates (GPS)

Latitude Longitude
N 35.390555555556 ° E -84.569166666667 °
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Address

County Road 602

County Road 602
37303
Tennessee, United States
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Beth Salem Presbyterian Church tn1
Beth Salem Presbyterian Church tn1
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Trinity United Methodist Church (Athens, Tennessee)
Trinity United Methodist Church (Athens, Tennessee)

Trinity United Methodist Church is a historic Methodist church in Athens, McMinn County, Tennessee. The congregation was founded in 1824-5 as the Methodist Episcopal Church of Athens. Its first meeting house was a structure of hewn logs built by slaves. It stood at the southwest corner of West Washington and Church Streets in Athens. It was eventually replaced by a brick building. When the Civil War resulted in a split within the Methodist Episcopal denomination, the congregation affiliated with the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. After the 1939 merger between that denomination and the Methodist Episcopal Church and the Methodist Protestant Church, the church became known as Trinity Methodist Church. It became a United Methodist church in 1968, when the Methodist Church and the Evangelical United Brethren Church combined to form that denomination.The present church building was completed in 1910 at a cost of $32,449.28; its education wing was added in 1926. The Gothic Revival architectural design of the 1910 church was provided by Badgley and Nicklas, a Cleveland, Ohio, architecture firm. The building design features two towers, stained glass windows with stone tracery, an octagonal dome ceiling, and eight columns to represent the eight people who survived Noah's flood. It has an Akron floor plan, which allows the sanctuary to be expanded to accommodate large events.In 2009, the church building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places.