The Tennessee Overhill Experience

The Tennessee Overhill Experience. From Furs to Factories. This 1920s-era frame building, home to the Beth Salem Cumberland Presbyterian Church, stands as a carefully tended symbol of the freed slaves and their descendants who once were part of an integrated community of subsistence farmers. The Beth Salem Church was founded in August, 1866 by two black ministers, the Rev. George Waterhouse and Jake Armstrong, end several former slave families. The Rev. Fate Sloop, a local white minister, held classes under a tree for the founders, many of whom could not read or write, to instruct them in setting up their church., The first services were under a rough brush arbor, but land was later donated by Mrs. Patsy Fite, a white neighbor, for construction of a log meeting house. For decades, camp meetings and the annual August meeting at Beth Salem attracted African-Americans, and sometimes whites, from surrounding communities and counties. The first teachers at Beth Salem School, held in the same building, were white Presbyterian missionary women sent in from the North. Within a few years, black teachers were hired to teach 3 months each fall, and, later, full-term classes for grades 1-8., Captions: , . (Right, top) Homecoming ("August Meeting") at Beth Salem Church, circa 1950s. Regular church services at Beth Salem ceased in the 1950s, about a decade after classroom instruction ended, as members left their family farms for factory and service jobs. Yet for more than 40 years, people who grew up in the church and their descendants have supported its upkeep. Each summer as many as 100 people return for "August Meeting” to commemorate ancestors and celebrate their common heritage with preaching, singing, and dinner-on-the grounds. , . (Right, bottom) Beth Salem farmer, circa 1920s. Photographs courtesy of Dorothy Hitchcock., This site is part of the Tennessee Overhill Heritage Trail and is an official Tennessee 200 Bicentennial Project. Interpretive signs, museums, historic sites and a guidebook tell the story of the Industrial Revolution as it happened in McMinn, Monroe, and Polk Counties. For more information concerning other sites, contact the Tennessee Overhill Heritage Association at 423-263-7232.