Brick (Bethel) Church
Screven County, Screven County, Georgia
Marker Inscription
Brick (Bethel) Church. On Dec. 5, 1827 the Rev. Peyton L. Wade conveyed to John Green, John H. Smith, Robert W. Lovett, Richard Herringtom, Sr., Jacob Lewis, Elijah Roberts and John H. Nessmith, Trustees, two and three quarter acres of land on which to build a Methodist Episcopal Church to be known as "Brick Church." Construction was started immediately. The building now on the site is the original. "Brick Church" was a successor to Lessing's Meeting House, a log building, on nearby Rocky Creek at Scott's Spring. Rev. John Crawford, who died in 1822, was the founder of Methodism in this community. His widow, Sarah Maner Crawford, married the Rev. Wade in 1823. 124-20 GEORGIA HISTORICAL COMMISSION 1956
Erected by Georgia Historical Commission
The Story
In 1827, on land deeded by the Rev. Peyton L. Wade, Screven County Methodists raised a brick sanctuary they simply called 'Brick Church,' successor to an earlier log meeting house on nearby Rocky Creek. The congregation traced its roots to the Rev. John Crawford, remembered as the founder of Methodism in the community, whose widow later married Wade. The original 1827 building still stands on the site.
Why it matters
It marks the spread of frontier Methodism through the early-nineteenth-century South, when a rural church often anchored a whole community's social life.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
In 1827, when Screven County Methodists set about building the sanctuary they would simply call "Brick Church," Georgia was still a young state on a growing nation's frontier. This was the era of the early American republic, when settlement was pushing into the interior and rural communities were putting down permanent roots — often with a church as the first substantial building they raised together.
Methodism was spreading rapidly across the early-nineteenth-century South, carried in large part by circuit-riding preachers who traveled enormous distances on horseback to reach scattered congregations. In such a landscape, a fixed house of worship was a milestone. It meant a community had grown settled and confident enough to build something lasting in brick, not logs.
That contrast is written into the church's own history. Brick Church succeeded an earlier log building — a meeting house on nearby Rocky Creek — and the move from timber to brick marks exactly the kind of maturing that was happening across the rural South as frontier settlements became established communities.
People & events
On December 5, 1827, the Rev. Peyton L. Wade conveyed a small parcel of land — two and three-quarter acres — to a group of trustees so they could build a Methodist Episcopal church. The trustees' names, recorded on the marker, read like a roll call of the community's founding families: John Green, John H. Smith, Robert W. Lovett, Richard Herrington Sr., Jacob Lewis, Elijah Roberts, and John H. Nessmith. Construction began at once.
But the congregation's roots ran deeper than 1827. It traced its origins to the Rev. John Crawford, remembered as the man who founded Methodism in this community, and who died in 1822. The faith he planted outlived him — and in a very human turn, his story became entwined with the church's benefactor: his widow, Sarah Maner Crawford, married the Rev. Wade in 1823.
Those few facts sketch a small world in which faith, family, and land were deeply interconnected. The preacher who founded the congregation, the widow who carried his memory forward, and the minister who provided the ground for its permanent home were all bound together — the kind of tightly woven relationships that held an early rural community together.
Its place in the American story
Brick Church stands for a movement that reshaped the religious landscape of the American South. In the decades after the Revolution, Methodism grew from a small dissenting movement into one of the largest expressions of American faith, largely by meeting frontier people where they were — in log meeting houses, in clearings, and eventually in modest brick sanctuaries like this one.
In communities across the early republic, a church was rarely just a place of Sunday worship. It was frequently the center of a rural community's whole social life — the place people gathered, married, mourned, and organized. To trace the founding of a single congregation is to glimpse how such communities cohered in an age before towns, courthouses, or much of anything else had arrived.
The survival of the original 1827 building gives that story unusual weight. Many frontier-era churches were rebuilt, moved, or lost. A sanctuary still standing on its founding ground, nearly two centuries on, is a rare and tangible link to the moment when American Methodism was still putting down its first permanent roots in the southern countryside.
If you visit
The remarkable thing to appreciate here is continuity: the building on the site is the original one, raised in 1827. Look at the brickwork and the plain, sturdy lines of an early Methodist sanctuary — architecture that speaks of a community pouring its resources into something meant to endure rather than impress.
Set in the quiet of rural Screven County, in Georgia's coastal plain, the church keeps the unhurried feel of a country meeting place. It's worth remembering, as you stand there, that this brick building replaced a log one on nearby Rocky Creek — you're looking at the moment a frontier congregation decided it was here to stay.
This is a stop for travelers who like their history quiet and genuine, off the main routes. There are no crowds and no spectacle — just an old country church that has held its ground since the 1820s, and the names of the families who built it still remembered on the marker at its edge.
Written by AI to add context, grounded in the marker’s inscription and the historical record. The inscription above is the original, unaltered text.
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Related people
- · Peyton L. Wade
- · John Crawford
Themes & tags
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