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Location
Liberty Chapel Road, Mars Bluff
City
Mars Bluff
County
Florence
Date of Founding
1868
Date of Photograph
1-1-2014
Description
Founded in 1868 with Rev. James Wesley Johnson as its first minister, Mt. Zion held its early services in a brush arbor. In 1870, trustees purchased a 1 ¾-acre tract to build a “Negro Schoolhouse” sponsored by the church, the first in the Mars Bluff community. This sanctuary, originally a frame building, was built in 1875 on a tract purchased from the school. The sanctuary was extensively remodeled and covered in brick veneer in 1970. The nearby cemetery, established in 1876, includes the graves of such early church leaders as Anthony H. Howard (1840-1908), a former slave who served in the S.C. House of Representatives during Reconstruction. Howard was also one of several black farmers who grew rice here after the Civil War. Source: SCDAH
Source
SC Department of Archives and History
Rights
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License