Concord Methodist Church Site

This ground holds an early church site in Whitley County, Indiana. In eighteen thirty-nine, Jacob and Catherine Van Houten are said to have deeded a quarter acre of frontier land for a house of worship, and the settlers raised a simple log meeting house here, called Concord Methodist Church. The following year, another local family, Samuel and Rebecca Smith, gave adjoining land for a cemetery.

In eighteen fifty-one the congregation replaced the original log walls with a framed building. The church itself is long gone now, but the burying ground remains, just southwest of Churubusco and directly across from that first deeded plot. It is a small reminder that nearly every settled corner of the Midwest began with a single act like this, a family giving up a piece of cleared land so the community would have somewhere to gather.