Ebenezer Church
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The Gordon Family

Ebenezer Church, also, The Gordon Family. . Ebenezer Baptist Church is the oldest church on the northern end of Sand Mountain. Its origins date back to an 1850s log church and school called Gordon Chapel. Renamed Ebenezer, the church became a member of the Tennessee River Baptist Association circa 1875. Pioneer preachers of the church included the reverends Z. H. Gordon, Thomas L. Quarles, J. C. Lambert, and Thomas J. (Tom) Smith., In 1909, the log church was replaced with a white, wood-framed building located on three acres of land donated by James Monroe and Millie Winters. In use for a half-century, the second structure burned on January 18, 1959. The congregation worshipped at the American Legion Hall until July 1960, when the church's third sanctuary was completed. During the previous century, the church was affiliated at different times with the Lookout Valley (Georgia) Baptist Association and the Sand Mountain Baptist Association., Reverse Side , The Rev. Zachariah H. Gordon (1794-1886) was a pioneer landowner, businessman, and settler of the area that became Bryant, Alabama. In the mid-1850s, Gordon moved his family from Walker County, Georgia, to an Alabama farm near the northern end of what is now Jackson County Road 89. The family started a church and school called Gordon Chapel soon thereafter., Living near the borders of three states, son John B. Gordon (1832- 1904) wrote in his 1903 autobiography that before the Civil War began his family resided in Alabama, mined coal in Georgia, and received their mail at a post office in Tennessee. During the Civil War, John B. Gordon served with the "Raccoon Roughs." rising to the rank of major general. After the war, he was twice elected to the United States Senate (1873 and 1891) and was Governor of Georgia from 1886 to 1890., In 1863, Rev. Gordon sold his Cole City Hollow mining interests to the Castle Rock Coal Company and relocated to southwest Georgia. He died in 1886 and is buried in Linwood Cemetery in Columbus, Georgia. The first post office in Bryant, Alabama, opened in 1891, near Moore's Gap., Erected during the bicentennial of Jackson County and the State of Alabama.