One casualty of the mid-June storms was the original building of Ridgeland First United Methodist Church.
Wesley Chapel collapsed due to the winds on Sunday, June 18, between 7 and 8 p.m. As far as the church has been able to tell in their research, the chapel was built close to 1890. It was dedicated for the first time in 1896 and was originally an Episcopal Church on Old Canton Road. The Methodist church purchased it in 1901 and moved it from its location to the corner of West Jackson and Perkins.
“At that time, they paid the pastor $100 to take it apart and every board was numbered then loaded onto a horse and wagon and brought to the corner of Jackson and Perkins and put back together,” the Church Staff Parish Relations Chair Jennifer Hart said.
It was their first church building and used as the sanctuary until the 1950s when it was moved to the side of their education building and a new sanctuary was built. It remained there as a Sunday school building and fellowship hall until the early 1990s when it was moved to the back corner on Perkins and Maple where it remained until this day.
“It represents our history as a church,” Hart said. “We still have some members who can remember going to church there when it was the sanctuary they grew up in. I’ve been at the church for about 45 years and all of that time, it had not been the actual sanctuary, but it was a connection to the church. I always believed that the time would come when we were going to renovate it, and that I would possibly get married in it. That was always my dream.”
The church had finally gotten to the point that they were making plans to restore it to a usable chapel, wedding venue and meeting place for small worship services because of its importance. However, they hit some roadblocks that had caused them to not go through with it yet.
“The only thing that put us at a standstill was being able to do a really good campaign and get money in order to do it, but when covid came in, a lot of contractors in the area had their pick of being able to take what jobs they wanted,” Hart said. “It was too small of a job for them. So, we were still in the holding pattern waiting to be able to get something done with it.”
Ridgeland First United Methodist Church is currently in the process of disaffiliation from the United Methodist Church and, as they were picking their new name that they will go by after the disaffiliation, nearly every choice included “Wesley” in it.
“We ended up choosing to be Old Town Wesley Church to commemorate and bring that history back into who we are,” Hart said.
The collapse of the chapel and such an important part of the church’s history has been devastating to not only church members but the surrounding area, Hart said.
“There has been a non-stop flow of people coming and driving through just looking and taking pictures and walking around and seeing it,” Hart said. “People who used to go to church and have left have been coming through just to see it, and I’ve had people on Facebook that have moved off and are not even in the area anymore commenting on how sad it is.”
While it is early in the planning process, Hart said they are definitely going to try to salvage as much of the wood as they can from the chapel, so whether they choose to rebuild or do something different, the chapel can be incorporated into whatever they do.
“We’ve got calls in to our insurance company, so we’re hoping that there will be insurance money, but we were going to have to do fundraising to get it restored in the first place,” Hart said. “We will have to probably kick in and do fundraising campaigns as well.”
Whatever the chapel remains are used for moving forward, it will be important for it to be a part of the church due to its history.
“This is, if not the oldest building in the City of Ridgeland, it is one of the oldest,” Hart said. “It’s 127 years old, as far as we can tell. It represents who we are. Our church has always been that small town, home-feel church, and that chapel has always been a part of it. We don’t want to completely lose that in any way, and we want to hold on to that.”
