Blackwater Presbyterian Church
Near Rehoboth Beach, Delaware
On this quiet ground near Clarksville stood the oldest Presbyterian congregation in southern Delaware. Blackwater Presbyterian Church organized its congregation in seventeen sixty-three and built its church in seventeen sixty-seven, established by the traveling minister Charles Tennent in a region where Methodists and Baptists otherwise dominated.
The building you would have seen was a small frame chapel, sheathed in clapboard, about thirty-five feet by thirty feet. Inside were simple pews, two wood stoves for heat, oil lamps, and a hand stenciled decorative border running along the walls. The structure was rebuilt in eighteen ninety-three, though much of its earlier fabric survived underneath. The congregation was dissolved in nineteen twenty-one, and despite efforts to save it, the long abandoned chapel finally deteriorated beyond repair and was demolished in twenty eighteen. The churchyard and its old graves remain, a marker of more than two centuries of faith in the Delaware countryside.
