In northeast Alabama, near Lookout Mountin, sits a church that was founded in 1907. Edna Hill Methodist Church served this rural congregation until the 1950s.
Edna Hill Methodist Church-DeKalb County, Alabama
Tag Archives: abandoned
Blooming Grove Methodist Church-Polk County, Georgia
The church is in northwest Georgia near the Alabama border. The congregation was founded in 1856.
Rowland Grove School-Burke County, Georgia
Founded in 1926 on the corner of Ivanhoe Plantation, this land was donated by Mrs. Clarissa Dye and her son Rowland Dye to start a one-room schoolhouse. They were the direct descendants of Charles Alden Rowland, the founder of Ivanhoe Plantation.
The school was started when Jim Hall, a sharecropper on Ivanhoe Plantation, asked the Dyes about the possibility of getting land to start the school. When it opened, there were no glass windows, just shutters. It had a white steeple roof. Savella Hall, Jim’s wife, was the first teacher at the school.
Like so many schools, the building had other uses. On the weekend, it served as the benevolent society.
Thank you to the Burke County Archives for confirming the identification of the building and sharing the older photo of the school. Information on the school was pulled from Eugenia Mills Fulcher’s 1999 dissertation, “Dreams do come true: How rural one- and two-room schools influenced the lives of African Americans in Burke County, Georgia, 1930-1955.”
Young’s Chapel Methodist Church-Ben Hill County, Georgia
Located on a dirt road in Ben Hill County, Georgia, this church has been documented by many photographers. The congregation formed in 1875. It is believed the church was built in 1876. The church closed its doors in the 1970s. Since then it has been a slow decline which was sped up when the area was hit by a tornado in 2017. There is a cemetery in the back of the church, and it is surrounded by cotton fields.
