Mullica Hill Historic Walking Tour
Trinity Methodist Church
1848 · South Main Street
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Mullica Hill's Methodists worshipped in one another's houses for a generation. Then they built two churches in twenty-one years.
The circuit riders' era is remembered vividly in the 1883 county history: services "in private houses, school-houses, barns, groves, and, in fact, anywhere that the people would gather." By 1827 the Methodists were numerous enough to build, and their first meeting house went up on High Street. Twenty-one years on they had outgrown it. In 1848 the congregation raised the clapboard church in front of you, trading the side street for the town's main thoroughfare. The next hundred years brought Sunday school rooms and a steady place at the center of village life. The 1827 building finished its days as a private house and eventually came down; its cemetery is still there, west of the old site.
In a photograph taken around 1905, the big neighbor on the church's right hand was Kier's Tin Shop. Joseph P. Stratton pulled the tin shop down and put his own new house on the spot, and that house went on to serve as the church's parsonage. Stratton's distinction was of a newer kind: Mullica Hill's first automobile dealership was his. The town's first automobile dealer built the house where its ministers lived.
The congregation moved out in 2003, into a new sanctuary on Cedar Road, and this building turned to commercial life, still holding its corner of the streetscape.
Around You Now
The Parsonage Antiques, a nine-room co-op with ten dealers, keeps shop at 31 South Main beside the church.