Shown is CA 1890 and a contemporary view of the Locust Grove United Methodist Church. Thanks to Mrs. Harry Reed & H. Johnson Jr, for their assistance with this article.
(By Stephen Kelley from the Peoples Defender, 1983)
Christmas Day of this year ushered in the bicentennial of Methodism in the United States. It was two hundred years ago when Francis Asbury and Thomas Coke met with sixty clergymen in Lovely Lane Chapel in Baltimore, Maryland. At that historic meeting procedures for governing the newly formed denomination were established and the Methodist Church was officially begun.
Among the older Methodist churches in Adams Couty is that at Locust Grove. This congregation was organized in 1825 and first started meeting in the home of Jacob Tener with Jacob Newland as class leader. The first church building was not constructed until 1829. Like so many early churches in this area, this structure was built of hewn logs chinked with a mixture of mud, horsehair and lime. It was replaced in 1854 with a neat frame building measuring thirty-five feet in width by fifty feet deep. Although greatly remodeled and enlarged down through the years, this same basic structure is still in use today.
According to historian H.C. Pemberton, the Locust Grove Methodist Church”.. was lighted by tallow candles, but in course of time these gave way to kerosene lamps that were mounted on posts set along side the aisles, and at the pulpit and along the sides of the church. These were followed by hanging chandeliers of a very pretty design.:” And in the early Methodist tradition, the 1854 church building was planned with two front doors, one for men, the other for women to enter. Again, quoting from Pemberton, “For many years it was the custom for males to sit on the north side and the female on the south side and the females on the south side, but later custom permitted both sexes to sit together on either side.”
One of the largest crows to assembler at this church was to welcome home Locust Grove native, Lieutenant William H. Reddick, it was in May, 1863 when an overflow gathering of people met to honor the hometown hero who had recently been awarded the Congressional Medal of honor by President Abraham Lincoln. Reddick had been a member of the ill-fated Andrew Raiders, a group of Union soldiers who had attempted capturing a Confererate train in Tennessee and using it to disrupt rail lines in the South. The Locust Grove United Methodist Church building has undergone numerous facelifts and renovations repairs during its one hundred thirty-year tenure. It required extensive repairs in 1860 following the great storm that devastated southern Ohio that year. Other major remodeling was completed in 1906, ‘28, ‘47, ‘62, ‘70, and ‘82. Today the church maintains a strong, active congregation and stands overlooking the village, a symbol of this nation’s freedom of worship.
