St. John A.M.E. Church
Frankfort, Franklin County, Kentucky
Marker Inscription
Early Congregation. The A.M.E. Church was established in Frankfort, 1839, by Negroes before days of emancipation. First structure built on Lewis Street. Building and ground given by Mrs. Triplett, a white lady, to her servants, Benjamin Dunmore and Benjamin Hunley. In 1881, Rev. D. S. Bentley gave the name "St. John" to the A.M.E. Church. Present church built in 1893.
Erected by Kentucky Historical Society
The Story
African Americans in Frankfort established this African Methodist Episcopal congregation in 1839, decades before emancipation, worshipping in a building on Lewis Street that a white woman, Mrs. Triplett, gave along with the ground to her servants Benjamin Dunmore and Benjamin Hunley. The congregation took the name "St. John" in 1881 under the Rev. D. S. Bentley, and the present church was built in 1893.
Why it matters
An A.M.E. church founded under slavery, it embodies the determination of enslaved and free Black Americans to build independent institutions of faith and self-governance well before the Civil War.
The story behind this marker
AI contextThe era
Frankfort in 1839 was a slaveholding town in a slaveholding state, more than two decades before the Civil War and emancipation. In that world, the vast majority of Black Kentuckians were enslaved, and even free African Americans lived under tight legal restrictions on movement, assembly, and worship. To gather as a congregation at all was to press against those limits.
Yet these were also the years when the African Methodist Episcopal Church — founded in the North by Black Americans who had walked out of churches that treated them as second-class worshippers — was spreading as a symbol of independent Black faith and self-government. Its very existence declared that African Americans could ordain their own ministers and run their own institutions.
For a Black congregation to take root in a Southern town before emancipation was therefore an act of quiet determination. Worship became one of the few arenas where enslaved and free Black people could exercise leadership, build community, and hold something that was genuinely their own.
People & events
The congregation was established in Frankfort in 1839 by African Americans in the years before emancipation — an origin the marker names plainly and one worth pausing over, because it means this faith community was built under slavery.
Its first structure stood on Lewis Street, on ground and in a building given by a white woman remembered as Mrs. Triplett to her servants, Benjamin Dunmore and Benjamin Hunley. It is a complicated, very human moment: a gift made across the deep divide of the slaveholding South, becoming the foundation on which a Black congregation raised its own house of worship.
The congregation carried on and grew. In 1881, the Rev. D. S. Bentley gave it the name it still bears — St. John. A dozen years later, in 1893, the present church was built, the visible sign of a community that had survived slavery, lived through emancipation and Reconstruction, and endured into a new era with its faith intact.
Its place in the American story
Across the nation, the independent Black church became one of the most important institutions African Americans ever built. Long before Black Americans could vote freely, hold most public offices, or count on the protection of the law, the church was a place they governed themselves — choosing leaders, managing property, and shaping the moral and civic life of their communities.
A congregation founded under slavery, as this one was, embodies that determination in its purest form. It shows that the drive toward independent institutions did not begin with emancipation; it was already alive in the 1830s, wherever Black Americans could find room to gather and worship on their own terms.
These churches would go on to serve as schools, meeting halls, mutual-aid societies, and, in the next century, the organizing hubs of the civil rights movement. Trace that lineage back far enough and you arrive at congregations exactly like this one — small, early, and stubbornly self-governing.
If you visit
Look first at the dates, and let the distance between them sink in. A congregation gathered here in 1839, but the building in front of you went up in 1893 — more than half a century later, and a generation after emancipation. You are seeing what that community was finally able to build once it was free to build in its own name.
As you stand here, hold two places in mind at once: this site, and the earlier one on Lewis Street where the first structure stood. The congregation's roots run deeper into the town than any single building can show.
This is a place that rewards a quiet, reflective stop rather than a quick photo. Frankfort's compact historic core makes it easy to linger, and a visit here adds an essential thread — the story of Black faith and self-determination — to any tour of Kentucky's capital.
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
- · Benjamin Dunmore
- · Benjamin Hunley
- · D. S. Bentley
Themes & tags
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