Sacred Ground:
Historic Churches Near Center Hill Lake

Salem Baptist Church in Liberty is the oldest continuous congregation in DeKalb County — and one of the most consequential. Its story begins not in DeKalb at all, but in Kentucky, with a Maryland-born farmer named Cantrell Bethel who crossed the state line to join a Baptist congregation because there simply were no Baptists where he lived.

Bethel returned from Kentucky a converted man, gathered a band of fellow believers, and began his ministry. He constituted a church on Brush Creek in Smith County on May 29, 1802, and then — securing what the old church records call an "arm" from that congregation — established Salem Church at Liberty in August 1809, with thirty-one founding members. The first building was a log structure, 25 by 30 feet. Modest by any measure, but substantial for a frontier settlement. The congregation sat on rough benches, the preacher stood at a simple wooden pulpit, and outside the windows the forest came right up to the walls.

That first log building was replaced by a frame structure around 1849, and then again by the current building around 1880 — a 40-by-70-foot frame church that stands today as part of Liberty's National Register Historic District. By 1902, Salem's membership had grown to 321 — a remarkable figure for a rural county. The cemetery beside the church is the largest in DeKalb County and holds the graves of many of the men and women who built the county: the Dales, the Fites, the Bethels, the Givans. Reading the stones is its own kind of history lesson.

One figure buried here deserves special attention: Reverend John Fite, who arrived in DeKalb County from Maryland and was originally a Presbyterian minister. In 1812, he converted to the Baptist faith and became one of the county's most prolific preachers, dying near Liberty in 1852 at around 93 years old. Fite helped constitute and pastor multiple congregations across the county over a ministry that spanned four decades of frontier Tennessee history. His descendants — the Fite family — appear in the church records at every level: deacons, clerks, ministers, and lay members, for generation after generation.

Seay Chapel United Methodist Church in Alexandria holds a distinction that is almost impossible to overstate: it is the only building in DeKalb County with a direct, documented connection to one of the most important works in American literary and intellectual history.

In the summers of 1886 and 1887, a young W.E.B. Du Bois — then a student at Fisk University in Nashville, later to become the Harvard-educated co-founder of the NAACP — came to this part of Tennessee to teach school. He found his students a few miles from Alexandria, thirty African American children whose classroom was a log corn crib. During those summers, Du Bois attended services at Seay Chapel. What he experienced inside — the power of Black faith, the way a congregation could hold suffering and joy simultaneously, the preacher's voice moving through a room — became central to The Souls of Black Folk, the 1903 masterwork that changed how Americans understood race.

Seay Chapel was built as a congregation of African American Methodists in the decades after the Civil War, a period when the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, formally split from the northern branch over the issue of slavery. Freed Black Tennesseans, no longer welcomed in the white Methodist congregations they had sometimes been permitted to attend during slavery, formed their own churches — and those churches became the institutional backbone of Black community life in the Jim Crow era. Seay Chapel was one of them.

The building itself is a simple, white-painted frame structure — vernacular in every sense: no architect, no pattern book, built by the congregation with materials at hand. But its simplicity is misleading. This is a building that contained something large enough to help shape one of the most consequential minds in American history.

Seay Chapel is now listed on the National Register of Historic Places and serves as a community gathering space. Visiting it — standing at the threshold of that small white building in that quiet town — and knowing what passed through it is an experience that doesn't require any particular religious belief. It only requires the willingness to be moved by a place.

The Methodist congregation in Smithville was formally constituted on August 25, 1844, with fourteen founding members — the first organized Methodist congregation in what was then a young county seat. For more than a decade the congregation met without a permanent building, gathering in homes and provisional spaces until 1848, when they erected the first purpose-built church in Smithville: a brick structure that stood as the most substantial building in town at the time. A frame building replaced it in 1856, and the congregation has grown and rebuilt since.

The early history of this congregation reads like a chronicle of the county itself. Its first long-serving pastor, Jesse Allen, held the pulpit from 1847 to 1860 — guiding the congregation through the turbulent years leading up to the Civil War. His successor, Hall Bethel, served from 1860 to 1870, which means he was preaching in Smithville as the county divided against itself, as men from the same congregation went off to fight on opposite sides, and as the community tried to hold together in the aftermath. The Methodist minister in a county seat in those years was not simply a religious figure — he was a community anchor, a moral authority, sometimes the only voice that could speak to the entire community without being dismissed as partisan.

The Methodist tradition in Tennessee has always been more formal than the Baptist one, and the architecture of Methodist churches generally reflects this. Where Baptist churches emphasized plainness and the interior word, Methodist churches in the Victorian era increasingly embraced the Gothic Revival style — pointed arches, decorative brickwork, a bell tower if funds allowed. Visit the First United Methodist Church in Smithville and you see this impulse expressed in a county-seat context: a congregation that began in someone's living room, constituted itself as a formal body, built in brick when brick meant permanence, and has maintained its presence at the center of Smithville's civic life for nearly two centuries.

Not all of DeKalb County's historic churches announce themselves with grand architecture or National Register plaques. Some of the most historically significant are quiet buildings on rural roads, known mostly to the descendants of the families who built them. New Hope Baptist Church, south of Alexandria, is one of these.

New Hope was established by Reverend William Dale, who began preaching at the home of Thomas Finley in 1818 and constituted the church with eighteen founding members — a remarkably small beginning for what would become a long-lived congregation. Dale was one of the county's founding figures: his father, Adam Dale, had been DeKalb County's first settler, arriving from Maryland in 1797 and building the first mill on Smith Fork Creek. The family's commitment to both civic and religious life runs through the county's early records like a thread — Adam Dale was the first clerk of Salem Baptist Church; his son William became one of its ministers.

The significance of a church like New Hope is not its building — which has been rebuilt and modified over the decades — but its role as a community anchor across time. For rural congregations in 19th-century Tennessee, the church was where neighbors gathered not just for worship but for everything else the community needed: weddings, funerals, debates, education. The church cemetery is where the community's memory was kept. When you visit a rural church like New Hope and stand in its cemetery, you are standing in the county's living archive.

Cooper's Chapel Baptist Church on Dismal Creek has one of the more unusual origin stories in the county. The site had been home to a log church called Goshen since 1821 — constituted by Cantrell Bethel and John Fite, the same men who built the county's earliest Baptist institutions. But Goshen generated little lasting interest and dissolved in 1837. For decades, the Methodists dominated the spiritual life of the Dismal Creek neighborhood.

Then, in 1879, a Baptist minister named Reverend J.C. Brien began preaching in the area. A congregation took shape and in 1880, Cooper's Chapel was constituted with nine members. The church was named for Isaac Cooper — a Mexican War and Confederate veteran who had, by this point, actually left the Methodists and joined the new Baptist congregation. The naming of the church after Cooper was, in a sense, an act of gratitude: it was largely his effort that had made the building possible, even though he wasn't the preacher and wasn't a founding member by denomination.

This kind of story — the church named for the man who built it rather than the man who preached in it, the veteran whose denominational allegiance shifted but whose community loyalty didn't — is typical of how religious life actually worked in rural DeKalb County. It was messier and more human than the clean denominational histories suggest. People followed preachers they trusted, moved between congregations, and built churches with whoever showed up with a hammer.