The small church on McDaniel Street began as St. Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church. The earliest reference I can find about the church is in 1930. Reverends I. S. Holness and I. J. Alston served as pastors at one time. This is located in the Pittsburgh community.
This church is located in the Pittsburgh neighborhood.
The congregation was founded in 1868 by freedmen and women of Troup County, Georgia. Initially, they met under a bush arbor. The church was built in 1906. An active church, baptisms were held in the nearby creek until recently, according to this article in the LaGrange Daily News.
I believe the wooden structure is a school since the history of the church states their first church building was built at the turn of the century. It also resembles the many one room schoolhouses that dot Georgia’s landscape.
The cemetery contains a mixture of prefabricated and handmade markers. It also includes at least two Eldren Bailey markers.
I believe this marker was made in the likeness of the church.
There were several markers in the cemetery that a similar angel and crown motif.
This marker contains the addition of P, 8, and S to the crown and wings. I am uncertain what means.
This marker did not have a name, but I was intrigued that the star was on the front and back side of the marker.
This is one of the Eldren Bailey markers in the cemetery.
Long Cane Baptist Church was founded in 1829, and this church was built soon after that between the years of 1834-1837. The upper windows indicate where the enslaved church members sat in the upper gallery. The church size is quite large for an antebellum church, especially a rural one.
According to the info provided on FindAGrave, three area cemeteries were going to be flooded with the creation of the West Point Dam, and those cemeteries, Potts Cemetery, Sheppard Cemetery, and Wilkinson Cemetery, were located to the church’s cemetery in 1962.
Founded in 1895, St. Mark AME called the stone edifice on James Brawley Drive their second home after they lost their first building to fire in 1948. They took over the space after the Western Heights Baptist Church vacated the building.
The church was built in 1920 using Stone Mountain granite. Designed by architect Charles Hopson, the church was built by fitting the stone together like a puzzle instead of cutting them.
The church received landmark status in 2022.
