Mt. Zion CME: The Church Freed People Built in Freedom
Tennessee
The brick church standing near the old African-American neighborhood of Union City, Tennessee, was built by the congregation's own members in eighteen ninety-six. It is the oldest African American church in Union City, and its history is bound up with one of the most important chapters in the story of Black religious life after emancipation.
In eighteen seventy, just five years after the Civil War ended, Black members of the Methodist Episcopal Church South organized a new and entirely independent denomination. They called it the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church. The name reflected the moment: a people who had been denied legal personhood were now forming their own institutions, on their own terms, with their own governance and their own theological voice. The Mt. Zion congregation in Union City organized that same year, making it one of the founding-generation churches of the new denomination.
For its first two decades the congregation worshipped in a frame building. By the eighteen nineties the church had grown large enough and its members prosperous enough to begin planning something more permanent. Under the guidance of the Reverend W. E. Farmer, the congregation members built the new church themselves. They completed and dedicated it in eighteen ninety-six. The architecture is a vernacular interpretation of Gothic Revival , pointed arches and brick construction done in the regional idiom of rural Tennessee rather than the high Gothic of a city cathedral.
In nineteen fifty-four the denomination changed its name from Colored to Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, reflecting both the changed legal status of its members and a desire to define the church by faith rather than race. The building itself was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand one.
The Mt. Zion church stands today as evidence of what freed people built in the generation after slavery: not temporary shelters, but brick buildings intended to last , institutions meant to anchor communities that had finally claimed the right to put down roots.
