Germanton Methodist Church, 1856
The Germanton Methodist Church and Cemetery are listed in
the National Register of Historic Places, and Laura Phillip’s 1997 nomination
contains a thorough history and detailed architectural description. Please click here to read the nomination.
The Germanton Methodist Church earns a lot of superlatives:
it is the oldest congregation in Germanton, its building is the oldest
religious building in Stokes County, and its cemetery is the oldest collective
burying ground[1] in
Stokes County.
The earliest known record of a Methodist congregation in
Germanton occurs in 1834 when the Book of the Stokes Circuit, North Carolina
Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church South recorded a quarterly meeting
in Germanton. In 1838, Jeremiah Gibson, a locally prominent merchant and
farmer, sold a piece of land on Main Street to John B. Hampton, David
Westmoreland, Elijah Fowler, James T. Wright, Solomon Petree, John White, Isaac
L. Gibson, Lewis B. Banner, and Elisha Banner, Trustees, for $50.00 where upon
the trustees were to build a place of worship for the Methodist Episcopal
Church.[2]
It is not known with certainty when or if the congregants
built a church here before they constructed the existing building. The
congregation operated a Sabbath School as early as 1838 and a January 1852
Conference meeting being held at Mt. Tabor adjourned to Germanton, where the
meeting place was warm, suggesting the presence of a building, but those
gatherings could have been held in the courthouse or another public building,
such as the Masonic Hall. A 1938 article in the Winston-Salem Journal notes that “A long [log?] church
was built about the same time as this deed [1838] was made but little is known
about it.”[3]
In any case, the congregation flourished and they built their
new brick sanctuary in 1856, and officially dedicated it in 1857. By that time,
the church’s membership included 49 white members and 27 African American
members, who, tradition suggests, were all enslaved. The church remained racially
integrated into the 1940s when Germanton’s remaining African American citizens
moved to Winston-Salem or elsewhere for work or died.[4]
The church’s earliest members and supporters, including
Banners, Petrees, and Gibsons, were also among the wealthiest residents of
Germanton. While constructing a new sanctuary, these families also invested heavily
in the establishment of a well-respected Masonic Institute that opened in 1852 and
a school for girls, which only operated briefly in the mid-1850s.[5]
They advocated for a railroad connection, built sizable homes in and around
Germanton, maintained strong ties with Salem’s Moravian merchants, and sent
their children to college.
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| Forsyth County Courthouse in Winston |
The builder of the church is not known, but it seems likely
that John Dietrich Tavis may have had a hand in its design and woodwork. Tavis,
a skilled house builder from Salem, who was very active in and around Germanton
during the mid-1850s, employed a fine but restrained Greek Revival style in his
Germanton-area homes, very similar to that seen at the Methodist Church. Furthermore,
the church’s steeple bears a remarkable resemblance to the steeple on the
Forsyth County Courthouse built in Winston in 1850. Although any local builder
may have been familiar with the Forsyth County Courthouse, Tavis lived in Salem
and certainly would have known that building’s designer, Francis Fries.[6]
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| Germanton Methodist steeple |
Additionally, at one point in the steeple’s history, clock
faces hung on each side of it, and local tradition holds that those were made
by a silversmith from Salem. As it turns out, the 1850 census enumerates Tavis next to Trougott Leinbach, a silversmith, who also carved Andrew Bowman’s
1847 tombstone in the church’s cemetery.[7]
Furthermore, the house next door to the church, the
Pepper-Blackburn-Petree House, appears to be Tavis’ work and the 1938 Journal article notes that next to the
church “is an old house that was built as a parsonage for the church. The doors
are paneled and the windows are many-paned like the church.” During the 1850s,
when the church and the front part of the Pepper-Blackburn-Petree House were
both constructed, the Pepper family owned the house and cemetery property. One
of the Pepper brothers, Clareridon Martin Pepper, was a Methodist minister who
served the Germanton congregation, strengthening the ties between the church
and the Pepper-Blackburn-Petree House.
Regardless of the builder, the church is a stylish and
imposing landmark, the likes of which was built nowhere else in Stokes County.[8]
Germanton had lost its place as the county seat in 1849 when Stokes was split to
form Forsyth County to the south, but according to many newspaper accounts in the
1850s, residents actively sought a rail connection for the town, and for a
while, it seemed as if they might get their wish. The hope and optimism
surrounding the railroad, which did not materialize until the 1880s, combined
with the statewide agricultural prosperity experienced by white farmers in the 1850s
resulted in a fine collection of Greek Revival work in and around Germanton, of
which the Methodist Church is an outstanding and almost unaltered example.
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| Methodist Church with clock faces photo from Bud Hill's collection |
The building features an austere, brick exterior with large
six-over-six sash windows and a central, double-leaf door with two-panel leafs
typical of Greek Revival architecture. Inside, the Greek Revival woodwork is
plain, but expertly finished with ramped handrails on the twin staircases
leading to the balcony. The sanctuary features paneled pews, window trim with
cornerblocks, and a tin ceiling that was probably a later addition.
The cemetery behind the church predates the congregation by
several years. The National Register nomination for the property suggests that
it started as a Gibson family cemetery because the earliest noted marked burial
was that of Rachel Gibson in 1828 and because her husband, Jeremiah Gibson, had
sold the congregation the land on which the church stands. However, at the time
the cemetery appears to have started, it was still part of the land associated with
the Pepper-Blackburn-Petree House, located immediately southwest of the church. That property was owned by Joshua and Martha Bitting Banner during the 1820s, and Joshua's 1848 estate included a lot with a grave yard. Additionally, the church's 1838 deed describes a lot that is one-half-acre in size, and 4.5 poles wide by 18 poles deep; that is wider than the church's current frontage and would not be deep enough to include the cemetery.
Joshua and Martha Bitting Banner had acquired the cemetery
property though inheritance: Anthony Bitting bought this land in 1798 from
Michael Fry. He gave a portion of it to his daughter, Martha Bitting Banner
before his death and the remainder passed to her and her husband upon Anthony’s
death in 1804. The 1798 deed does not mention a cemetery, and no extant markers
predate Anthony’s death; the marked burials started here in the 1820s, during
the ownership of Joshua and Martha Bitting Banner. The earliest marked burial
actually appears to be Martha’s nephew, Joseph Bitting who died in 1821, thus,
rather than a Gibson family cemetery, this cemetery seems to have started as a
Bitting-Banner family cemetery.[9]
Joseph Bitting was the son of Joseph Bitting (Martha Bitting
Banner’s brother) and Rachel Nelson Bitting. The elder Joseph operated a tavern
and storehouse on the courthouse square, but he died in 1798 when his son was
just three years old.[10]
His widow, Rachel, married prominent merchant, Jeremiah Gibson. In 1821, the
younger Joseph died, and was buried in this cemetery. Rachel only outlived her
son by seven years, and Rachel is the cemetery’s second earliest marked burial,
dating from 1828.[11]
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| advertisement for Joshua Banner's estate auction, 1848 |
The Bittings, Banners, and Gibsons were part of Germanton’s
circle of wealthy merchants, landowners, and farmers who participated in town
and county governance and commerce. Neither Anthony Bitting
nor Joseph and Martha Bitting appear to have lived on the lot containing the
cemetery. That combined with the families’ civic involvement create the
likelihood that the Bittings would have allowed the creation of a town burying
ground on their property.
In 1848, the Pepper family purchased the property from
Joshua Banner’s estate. The Banner-Pepper deed mentions the cemetery, referring to it generically without mentioning a specific family or church association, and the cemetery appears to be part of the transaction. In 1873, when C. M. Pepper sold the house to the William Blackburn, the lot shape was drawn to exclude the cemetery and the total land area was smaller than the area the Pepper family bought in 1848. A formal deed transferring this section of the cemetery to the church has not been uncovered, but C.M. Pepper, who was a Methodist minister that served Germanton, apparently gave the cemetery land to the congregation before 1873.[12]
Burials in the cemetery reflect a who’s who of Germanton’s
wealthiest white families from before the Civil War, and not all of the burials
are of church members, even well into the 20th century. This advances the notion that the cemetery operated as a community burial place before it came to be considered the
church’s cemetery.
In 1957, Ruth Petree,
who owned the old Anthony Bitting lot to the southwest of the church property,
transferred about 1.5 acres to the church for the expansion of the cemetery, and in 1965, the McKenzie family, on
the northeast side of the church, purchased the lowlands along the creek at the
rear of the property.[13]
Today, the church stands as a remarkable testament to the
town’s optimism, its willingness to invest in public institutions, and its
architectural sophistication. The cemetery encapsulates the town’s social
history and helps to document the lives of the town’s nineteenth century white residents.
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| photo from The State (now Our State Magazine), April 1, 1939 In an effort to right an obvious wrong, the accompanying article in The State was clearly plagiarized from Mildred Small's 1938 newspaper story about the church. |
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| receipt acknowledging payment to Trougott Leinbach for Andrew Bowman's tombstone |
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| Andrew Bowman's gravemarker, carved by Leinbach; several other markers in the cemetery are nearly identical photo from by B.N. Cheek on findagrave.com |
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| Gibson family markers |
Sarah Woodard David, 2016
[1]
Additional research on another Germanton cemetery may reveal that another
cemetery is the county’s oldest community burial ground. Stay tuned for a post
about this other cemetery in the future.
[2]
Laura Phillips, Germanton Methodist Church and Cemetery, National Register
Nomination, 1997, section 8, page 8, and Jeremiah Gibson to Trustees, Stokes
County Deed Book 12, page 268, December 10, 1838.
[3]
Phillips, section 8, page 8, and Mildred Small, “Germanton Church for All
Denominations,” Winston-Salem Journal, July
4, 1938, page number not recorded, clipping in the Stokes County WPA Writers
Project file at the North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, N.C.
[4]
Phillips, section 8, page 6, and Raleigh
Christian Advocate, page 2, July 9, 1857.
[5]
Greensboro Patriot, November 26, 1839, page 4, and John Woodard, ed, The Heritage of Stokes County (Winston-Salem: Hunter Publishing Company, 1981), 93.
[7]
1850 U. S. Census records accessed via ancestry.com, and Andrew Bowman Estate
Papers, North Carolina State Archives, Raleigh, N.C.
[8]
Phillips, section 8, pages 11-12.
[9]
Michael Fry to Anthony Bitting, Stokes County Deed Book 3, page 200, June 30,
1798, and John Pepper’s purchase of the property at auction from Joshua
Banner’s estate and John Pepper’s transfer of title to Dewit Pepper, Stokes
County Deed Book 18, page 184, April 11, 1853.
[10]
Joseph Bitting’s 1798 burial location is not known to the author. Anthony
Bitting, Joseph’s father, bought this land several months before Joseph’s
death, so it is possible that one of the many unmarked graves in the cemetery
is that of the elder Joseph Bitting.
[11]
Stokes County Marriage Records, accessed via ancestry.com, and grave markers.
[12]
For the deed references to this property, please see The Germanton Project post regarding thePepper-Blakburn-Petree House.
[13]
Ruth Petree to Trustees of Germanton Methodist Church, Stokes County Deed Book
133, page 130, November 15, 1957, and Trustees of Germanton Methodist Church to
L.M. and Ola McKenzie, May 4, 1965, as described in Dean Martin McKenzie to
Billy and Claudine McKenzie, Stokes County Deed Book 274, page 606, April 27,
1982.
