Germanton Methodist Church

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.

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]

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.

 

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]

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.

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.

receipt acknowledging payment to Trougott Leinbach for Andrew Bowman's tombstone

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

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.

[6]Click here for a fuller description of John Dietrich Tavis’ known work.

[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.