Shiloh Methodist Church
National Register Listing
Street Address:
Blackstock Road, Inman, SC (Spartanburg County)
Record Number:
S10817742054
Description and Narrative:
Shiloh Methodist Church, built between 1825 and 1830, is significant as a particularly intact example of the vernacular meeting house form of ecclesiastical architecture common in rural churches in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. It is the earliest surviving church sanctuary in Spartanburg County and one of the earliest in the South Carolina upcountry. Its congregation, founded shortly after the American Revolution, is the “mother church” of several Methodist churches in the area and churches of other denominations as well. The church’s simplicity of form and materials, as well as its strikingly rural and pastoral setting, has been preserved for more than 175 years. It is a simple, unadorned, one-room, rectangular building constructed in a vernacular meeting house form and clad in whitewashed, horizontally-applied drop or German siding. The church cemetery occupies the back portion of the three-acre lot. The grave markers in the cemetery, dating from 1816 to 2004, are a mixture of granite headstones, still in good condition, old markers with barely legible lettering, and some with unreadable letters even by tracing the stones; many graves are marked by plain field stones. Shiloh Methodist Church was a circuit church for most of its existence, dependent on a minister traveling a circuit to preach at several churches. About 1915, the last fourteen members of the congregation transferred their membership to Inman Methodist Church, now Inman United Methodist Church, which owns the historic church and cemetery. Listed in the National Register February 2, 2005.
Period of Significance:
1812;circa 1825 – 1830;1915
Level of Significance:
State
Area of Significance:
Architecture;Religion
National Register Determination:
listed
Date of Certification:
February 2 2005
