The Story Behind a Painting: One Snapshot of Chapel Hill and the Old Methodist Church on Opening Day, 1853

This article was written by, Gordon Johnson,  a member of University UMC’s Records and History Committee. He recently commissioned a painting by local artist Michael Brown.  Gordon, wanted to create a “record” of the original church which opened in 1853 (the building still stands at the corner of Rosemary and Henderson Streets).

My obsession began when Benjamin pointed to the ceiling and said, “See that? That’s where the steeple was.”

I knew there was no steeple in this church, but he seemed pretty confident, so I heard him out. He continued, “Yes. That’s the framing that supported the steeple. The steeple isn’t there now of course, but it WAS there.”

We stood in what remained of the 160 year old Methodist Church in Chapel Hill. One of only two of the original churches that were still standing in Chapel Hill. Chapel Hill is pretty old by American standards. The first-ever state college, the University of North Carolina, was opened here in 1795 right after the Revolutionary War. As the city of Chapel Hill slowly built up around the university, churches began popping up everywhere to serve the students and the general population. One of those churches was this modest little structure that we were standing in.

A few years before, when I first arrived at University United Methodist Church with my pastor-wife Mitzi Johnson, I was impressed to learn that the Methodist church opened its doors on July 3, 1853, over 160 years before! And even more impressive to me, the original church was still standing and in wonderful condition.

Growing up in Houston, I was surrounded by all new buildings. Everything was either brand new or soon to be replaced by something else brand new. So, when I heard we were moving to Chapel Hill, I was excited about the prospect of immersing myself in the history of an old, historical town. What I didn’t foresee was how passionate I would become about solving a simple and elusive mystery:

What did the steeple look like?

When I first heard about the old Methodist Church, I started researching it: leafing through old photographs, learning more about how it was built and why it survived when others did not. One thing that I didn’t see in any of those old photographs was a steeple.

So, when the current owner of the building, Benjamin Brodey, told me there was a support structure in the attic for a steeple, I was very intrigued.

When I first arrived in Chapel Hill, I wanted to help preserve the history of the church that my wife was working at, so I joined their Records and History Committee. Working with that team and going through all the old records, I was frustrated to learn that there wasn’t much of anything in the records going back as far as the original church. It seemed to stop suddenly around the time the second church was opened in 1889. In fact, the more I searched, the more I suspected that something bad happened to all those old records. It could have been a fire, water damage, neglect or someone decided it was time to clean house. Since the church didn’t have anything that went back that far, I thought it would be a great idea to create something. Maybe commission a painting to show the original 1853 church, in all its brand-new glory on their opening day in 1853. Something to show the joy and excitement they felt so long ago and show what the church would have really looked like back then.

But now I had a problem. I learned there was a steeple on the church and I had no idea what it looked like. I couldn’t do a painting of a church and have someone who was more informed than me come up to me and say, “That’s not what the steeple looked like!”

I had to find some old photograph to prove what it looked like. The university next door had amazing archives, so surely they had a photo or two of the church. The street the church was on was one of the early Chapel Hill streets, so there ought to be something.

After a bunch of research, I learned a lot about the early days of Chapel Hill, the Methodist church and the University of North Carolina, but nothing about the steeple. The main historical street in Chapel Hill is Franklin Street, which is famous now for having a million little restaurants and bars where students hang out to watch the Tar Heels play basketball. There were plenty of photos of that street in the 1800s, but unfortunately, the old Methodist church was a block away, just out of camera range and it was mostly just a residential street, so there was very little to photograph in the 1800s. I think I reviewed every photo the university had and I didn’t see a glimpse of that old church. The earliest photo I found of the church was 75 years after it was built. And in that photo, the church was labeled as a “dilapidated structure” and was on the brink of being torn down.

So, two years after Benjamin pointed to the ceiling of the old church, I finally settled on the realization that I would never know what the steeple looked like, and probably, nobody else would either. It was now safe to assume that nobody would look at the painting and say, “That’s not what the steeple looked like!”

So, I finally gave myself the go-ahead to commission the painting and guess at the steeple.

I found the perfect artist, Michael Brown. Michael is famous in these parts for producing amazing murals. If you drive through Chapel Hill for more than a few minutes, you will see a Michael Brown mural, covering the side of a building or deep down a dark alley. The paintings are eye-catching, very clever and transforming for some very bland walls. The murals also have a historical bent. Michael cares about the history of Chapel Hill and has a desire to get it right.

One of my favorite murals is in the old Chapel Hill post office building on Franklin Street. There are actually two murals in the lobby. One is by a famous muralist named Dean Cornwell, who depicted the laying of the original cornerstone on the University’s first building site in 1793.

The second mural is Michael’s mural. It’s the one that caught my eye. It shows the scene of the first land auction in Chapel Hill, which was essentially the birth of Chapel Hill. When the University was trying to create a town to support the school, there was literally nothing on top of the Chapel Hill, except for a few log cabins and some farms. So, for the university to thrive, they needed some private businesses to build restaurants, hotels, stores and most importantly, places for the students to sleep. So, the university sold the lots next to the school in the hopes of a free market economy filling in a void that they couldn’t fill themselves. What struck me about the painting of the auction was the historical accuracy. It didn’t depict a bunch of men-with-white-wigs in some courtroom, buying land. The people were real and the setting was real. There were bidders from every walk of life from farmers to Indians to merchants, outside in a field, eager to get some land that had the potential to turn a profit. It looked like someone pulled out a camera that day and took a snap shot.

That’s what I wanted for our painting of the church. Something that showed what the grand opening of the church really looked like, as if you were there that day. And something that conveyed the happiness they must have all felt.

I contacted Michael Brown and thankfully, he accepted the commission. I then turned my attention to helping Michael with the information that he needed to make the photo historically accurate.

I had so many questions.

Were there slaves at church that day?

Back in the 1850s, right before the start of the Civil War, most blacks in North Carolina were slaves. In Orange County where Chapel Hill is located in 1860, there were 5108 slaves and 528 free blacks. That’s ten slaves for every one free black person.

Our Methodist church kept pretty good records. Right before the old Methodist church was constructed, their membership was, “83 whites and 22 negroes.” That was a pretty astounding to me, to see such a high number of black members. The Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr. once said, “it is appalling that the most segregated hour of Christian America is eleven o’clock on Sunday morning.” Not many blacks are attending white churches today, and vice versa. The Old Methodist church averaged 20% black membership, all the way until the end of slavery.

So, that raised a lot more questions for the painting. Were those 22 black members slaves? Were they there that day? Were they allowed in the sanctuary and did they sit right next to the white members? Were they there willingly? How did they dress? And the bigger question, since we are so segregated in church today: Why were there so many black members in this church? I’ve never seen a movie, TV show or book depicting slaves attending white churches.

I could not answer all these questions, but I did confirm that most of the 22 blacks members were almost certainly slaves. It was quite common, at least in this part of North Carolina, to have slaves as church members. Even the Baptist church down the street had slaves in attendance who were full members, baptized and everything. At the Presbyterian Church nearby on old highway 86, some 60 African-Americans were slaves by owners and attended the church. The owners supported their going through the process of joining the church just as white members did.

I’ve read that many white slave owners wanted their slaves to be Christian, for good or not so good intentions. Either to pacify them, to save their souls or to give them something to do on Sunday.

Whatever the reason, there were definitely black people at church that day and I wanted them to be in the painting.

What did the steeple look like?

Since we couldn’t find a photo of the steeple, we had to guess. But the guess wasn’t a completely wild guess. First, we knew the steeple was square and six foot by six foot, which was fairly big for a small church.

We also knew that the church wasn’t wealthy and would not have been able to afford a tall and ornate steeple. They had to do some serious digging to raise the money to build the church. The pastor Samuel Milton Frost got a wild hair and, “took a leave of absence from the Conference in order to devote full time to the collection of funds. He traveled throughout the state, visiting Greensboro, Salisbury, Hillsboro, Pittsboro, Raleigh, Warrenton, and Henderson, among other places, and collected $5,000.”

I’m told that there was a real incentive for people living far away to devote money to build the church. The new university attracted students from all over the state and parents of those young students wanted them to be in church on Sunday. If they were Methodist, they wanted them in a Methodist church on Sunday!

So, other than those clues, there wasn’t much else to go on. In my research of steeples of that time period, I can safely say there were almost as many steeple designs as there were churches. Steeples are like a church’s fingerprint. The steeple is a visible statement about the church and many times, the steeple says, “We are far different and better than the church down the street.”

So, in the end we decided to go with a fairly simple steeple design that looked good and would have served its purpose of ventilating hot air out of an un-air conditioned church.

I still hope that someone someday comes to me and says, “I found a photo of the old steeple!” If they do, I will jump up and down with joy and happily pay our painter to add in the real steeple over the one we dreamed up.

What were they wearing on that day in July 1953?

Think “Gone with the Wind”. The women wore big dresses with tight bodices, like Scarlett O’Hara, but probably not as expensive. North Carolina was not a big plantation state like Georgia and South Carolina, so there wasn’t as much money floating around.

Almost everyone wore hats. This was pre-sunscreen, so hats served a very practical purpose. However, for men, the tall, black top hats were all the rage. They weren’t necessarily practical, because the brim didn’t do much to block out the sun, but they were status symbols. The taller the hat, the bigger the bank account. However, based upon some rare photos from this period, men wore a wide variety of hats, from wide brimmed farmer hats to little caps. It was all over the board.

In attendance that day were college professors, students, other clergy, merchants, farmers, manual laborers and of course, slaves. I’m sure there were a fair number of poor members who didn’t own anything resembling silk. But, they still would have worn their Sunday best.

Even though it was summer, men would have been mostly wearing dark, tight-fitting suits with long jackets. They were hot but the color was practical. Dark colors don’t show dirt, which was a good thing since washing clothes was a rare occurrence. All of the Chapel Hill streets were either dirt or gravel, so lots of dust was in the air in the summer months. Chapel Hill finally paved Franklin Street in the 1920s, but that was 70 years later.

What was the pastor wearing?

I first assumed the pastor was wearing a robe and stole just like most Methodist pastors do today. However, the motto for clergy dress in the 1850s was “plain.” And we could add “practical” to that. Methodist “circuit riders” were traveling, most often on horseback, and needed to dress according to the weather.

The pastor who led the congregation that day was J. L. Fisher. He was new to preaching in the Methodist church with only a few years under his belt, but he was up-in-age at 40 years old. He was also in charge of a second Methodist church in Hillsboro, 15 miles away. So, he did a lot of commuting by horseback, going back and forth over rutted dirt roads. For this reason, he almost certainly wore very practical clothes. He probably wore what is called a “preacher’s coat,” which is basically a long, black wool suit coat. Preacher’s coats are handy when you’re on a horse in rotten weather. The pastor may have also worn the traditional white clerical collar.

How were the people feeling that day?

I’m sure they were elated and relieved that they were finally moving into their own place.

Thirteen years before, when the University was still a modest little school and Chapel Hill was a small, dusty town, this group of Methodist-Episcopalians decided they needed a change. For years, they had been travelling to church on horses and wagons down three long miles of the dirt road along what is now Highway 86/MLK. They attended services at Orange Methodist Church, but needed something closer to home with “a different worship experience.” The group started meeting in a house on Rosemary Street, which was within a block of where they later built the church. They moved to a rented space on Franklin Street and were there for ten years, meeting on the second floor above a store. Because it was a rented space and because it was a spartan affair, “without furniture, except backless pine benches, and a cloth covered table for a pulpit,” I’m sure they were quite ready to get into their own place.

What did the church look like?

The church building has had some very caring owners over the past 165 years. On multiple times, several of them saved the building and kept it pretty much the same as it was when it was built. We know that the structure was made up entirely of thick beams, probably harvested from the acre that it sits on. The walls were made of crude bricks, covered in plaster.

At the time the church was built, many expensive buildings were fronted with marble or other stone panels. If you look at the old university buildings nearby, they are faced with stone. However, the church didn’t have the budget for that, so they did the next best thing. They covered the outside walls in plaster and made them look like stone by painting them the color of stone and adding fake grout lines that made it look like stone.

To prove this, I was at the old church one day when Benjamin invited me to go over to see the small apartment that was attached to the side of the church. He said there was something special to see. A sort of time capsule, he said.

After the church was sold by the Methodists, this new “lean-to” structure with an attic was attached to one side of the church. When Benjamin purchased the old Methodist church, he tore out the attic to make room for a loft in the attached apartment and found that the original walls of the church were preserved in the old attic! They were protected from the weather and later renovations, left alone and untouched for 125 years! The plaster was a gray-beige stone color with the original fake grout marks. I have to say, it passed for stone, even 160 years later.

What happened to the church building after the Methodists sold it?

The only reasons a church lasts for a long time are either because it is a historically significant structure, or it is a modest structure that can be transformed into something else for commercial purposes. Most old, grand churches are simply too expensive to renovate. Especially churches with big, impressive steeples. Also, a steeple doesn’t translate well to commercial use. The steeple would be the first thing to leave the old Methodist church.

Thirty years after the church was built, the Methodist congregation grew too big, so they built a bigger church on Franklin Street and sold the old church to what was once an abolitionist group named the American Missionary Association of New York. Before the civil war, this group was mostly focused on abolishing slavery and building schools for blacks. After the war, they changed their focus to building schools and churches for blacks. They were extremely successful, founding institutions like Howard University in Washington DC and many other universities, colleges, churches and schools.

One of those churches was the old Methodist church in Chapel Hill. The Methodists sold the building for $800 in 1889 and the new owners started a Congregationalist Church and school.

We think they immediately added the “lean-to” structure to the side of the church to give them space for classrooms to make it a combination church and school. This was the first combination church and school in the Chapel Hill area.

However, the Congregationalist Church only stayed in the building for 11 years and sold it to the Chapel Hill Improvement Company in 1900. After that, the church was used for pretty much everything you can imagine: an airplane mechanic shop, laundry, storage facility, market, filling station, auto garage, architect’s office, woodworking shop, and now a software company.

Was there a stone wall out front like many of the streets at the University?

The answer is probably no. There is no stone fence in front of the church now and are not many fences on the rest of Rosemary Street. You have to really want to get rid of a stone wall, considering the effort involved, so it’s unlikely.

Was the land cleared or was the church in the middle of a forest?

At that time, most of Chapel Hill was still covered in forest. Because Chapel Hill was a large rocky hill, the land was not very fertile and difficult to clear for farming. Because of this, the land was cheap, which made it a perfect spot for a university.

Before the university sold the one acre to the Methodists, they owned the land for 50 years. They owned it for all this time because it was supposed to be part of a grand thoroughfare which was never built. So, the land probably sat idle for all those years and the trees continued to grow for 50 more years. The one upside to this is that the church had plenty of lumber to choose from and they probably didn’t even clear the entire acre. In all likelihood, they probably only cleared the area right around the church to make room for “parking” for horses, wagons, etc.

However, we do know that there was a house within a block or two away. The reason why we know this is because our church as founded in that house! We know that the house was “the home of Miles Davis on Rosemary Street across from the Presbyterian Church.” Twelve years before the church was built, in 1841, our first pastor Charles Force Deems held services in that house and helped to found the church.

He did this with a small group of Chapel Hill Methodists who were previously attending Orange Methodist Church and went on to become the foundation for the church we know 175 years later as the University United Methodist church.

 

It’s been a great thrill for me to research for this painting. Unsolved mysteries seem to have that effect on me, as they probably do for a lot of other people.

There a lot of mysteries still left to be solved though, including the big one that will continue to haunt me:

What did the steeple look like?

I’ll leave that one to someone else.

Many thanks to the following people for helping in the research for this painting:

• Susan Newrock from the Chapel Hill Historical Society, who maintains a wonderful archive of Chapel Hill history and dug deep into it to help with the research.
• Benjamin Bradey who is the most recent savior of the church and took the time to show me the inner workings of the building and talk me through what he learned during his extensive efforts to preserve the building.
• The members of the University UMC Records and History committee, who continue to invest their time and effort into preserving our history.
• The staff of the University of North Carolina’s Wilson library, who helped me review their archive and find all the Chapel Hill photos from the 1800s.

 

This painting is dedicated to Bill Olsen, a Chapel Hill treasure. He is officially the biggest fan of University United Methodist Church and has had an uncanny way of bringing out the best in me.