Saint Paul A M E Church

This congregation carries one of the deepest Black histories in Florence. Back in the early eighteen forties, according to local tradition, a small group of African American members broke away from the white First Methodist church and formed their own worship community known as Church Springs. By eighteen fifty-seven they were meeting in a converted brick cow shed under the Reverend Robin Lightfoot.

After emancipation the site served as a missionary school for the freed people. In eighteen seventy-nine the congregation was formally organized as Saint Paul African Methodist Episcopal. Florence's Black Methodist history is also tied to the family of W.

C. Handy, the Florence-born musician remembered as the Father of the Blues, whose grandfather became an African Methodist Episcopal minister. The church relocated over the years, but its roots reach back to the very first generations of free and enslaved Black Methodists in the Shoals.