‘Don’t erase me.’ 150-year-old Black church in NC threatened with demolition.
Lela Johnson, 97, was a member of one of the oldest Black churches in North Carolina. She recalls lugging water from the nearby springs for the building and carrying wood before service to make a fire in the pot belly stove to heat Brevard’s Chapel United Methodist Church and its members.
“I would hate to see it torn down,” Johnson said with her eyes closed, remembering her time at the site.
But that’s exactly what might happen. The Denver, N.C., church closed in 2020 after about 150 years due to water damage and declining membership. The Western North Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church announced in February that engineers determined the chapel was not salvageable and it plans to demolish it.
The nonprofit HEARTS Collaborative has been meeting with Denver community members for months to gather memories and history on Brevard’s Chapel in hopes of saving it. The Lincoln County chapel was built by newly emancipated African Americans in the 1870s following the Civil War.
The organization has put together a plan to restore the church and submitted it this month to Wesley Community Development, a non-profit real estate firm the conference partnered with for the site’s development.
The Methodist Church conference “did want to make sure we were honoring the history of the congregation,” said Aimee Yeager, director of communication for the conference.
“In partnership with several of the Black United Methodist churches in Lincoln county we developed this plan to create a community park and to build the pavilion using pieces from the church building.”
Yeager said this plan was developed to keep the site as a space where people can gather and connect with nature, each other and God.
The Methodist conference did not provide the cost of its original construction plan in time for publication.
The HEARTS Collaborative in partnership with other groups believed there was a way to save the building “which would be a much better monument,” co-founder Abigail Jennings said. “To honor the African-Americans that built that church is to save the church.”
Jennings said the preservation and rehabilitation of the chapel is crucial due to its historical and architectural significance, and community value.
HEARTS’ restoration plan addresses the Methodist church’s original reasoning that expenses would be too high to fix the chapel, Jennings said.
“We were able to put together an alternative plan to restore and rehabilitate the church, which cost much less than what had previously been thought,” said Jennings. “In addition, we provided a future sustainability plan, which includes sharing the history, bringing it back as a chapel, as well as a community center for meetings and events.”
After removing the drop ceiling, carpet and some paneling, the group found that the materials underneath were in good shape.
The preservation group hopes construction would be completed by June 2026 and a grand opening to the community, HEARTS programming and site rentals July 2026.
All work at the site has been paused with no plans to move forward until the United Methodist Church and Wesley Community Development review the proposal. A decision will be announced to the preservation groups during a meeting the first week of July, Jennings said.
Importance of Black churches
Lela Johnson’s niece Glenda McCorkle has heard her aunt’s stories and used to visit Brevard’s Chapel with her grandparents during some summers as a child.
She says the chapel is part of history.
“The spirit in that church carried (members) through many dangerous tolls and terrors,” McCorkle said. “The church has always been the foundation of the community.”
Henry Brevard was the successful free man who gave the land for the church. Michael Connor, a descendant of Brevard, also would like to see the chapel restored as a historical site.
“I think it’s a good historical reference,” he said. “A lot of African-Americans that came from there went on to become ministers and leaders of other churches and they moved out the area but they got their start at Brevard.”
“It’s almost like your ancestors are speaking to you and saying ‘don’t erase me because I was real.’”
Connor noted Black churches’ significance as a social gathering place after the Civil War. Black churches were spaces to both pray and be educated, he said. They developed leaders in the African American community and it is where Black people learned before the Rosenwald schools were built.
“We cannot erase any of the footsteps from these early churches. They were the beginning of churches and schools that were to come,” he said.
McCorkle and Connor said they would like to see the chapel used in the future. They gave ideas for its use such as becoming a museum with a tour guide, a conference center, community center or place for reunions and weddings.
About HEARTS Collaborative
HEARTS stands for History, Ecology, Arts, Reunion, Trails, and Store. This acronym describes the organization’s mission, Jennings said.
“We bring history really to life through sharing local stories, local memories, and nature of a place and adding in local art to it to make it really wonderful in the community program,” she said. “When there’s something that looks like it’s going to be lost, that’s where we are able to come in and help create a plan to save it for the future.”
HEARTS Collaborative is working with other groups including Lincoln Landmarks, Lincoln County Historical Association, Preservation North Carolina, Lincoln County Historical Commission and Preserve Mecklenburg to restore Brevard’s Chapel, according to Jennings.
The effort has received support from all over the country and from the Denver community, said Jennings.
“This church, it’s on a prominent road that a lot of people travel on, so even people that didn’t have historical connections to the church itself know this church just because it’s so lovely,” she said. “It would be very missed as a part of that landscape if it was taken down.”
This story was originally published June 24, 2025 at 5:01 AM.
