St. George, South Carolina Sunday, October 25, 2026 Complimentary

County Line Confidential

Dispatches from Dorchester County, South Carolina. Filed weekly. Not all of it true. None of it made up.

Appleby’s Methodist Church and Cemetery

Appleby’s Methodist Church, at the corner of Wire Road and Cowtail Road southwest of St. George, was founded in 1787 and the present building went up between about 1840 and 1850. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on February 14, 1978 as an unusually intact example of the Greek Revival meeting house, and its cemetery dates from the late 1800s.

The congregation is older than the building by half a century. The building is older than the county by that much again. Neither has changed much.

When was Appleby’s Methodist Church founded?

The United Methodist Church’s historic places survey gives 1787 as the founding date, the same year the Indian Field congregation a few miles north got its start. That puts Appleby’s among the first Methodist societies in what was then St. George, Dorchester parish of Colleton District, a decade before Francis Asbury rode through preaching at Indian Fields. The National Register nomination lists two periods of significance, around 1800 and around 1840 to 1850, which covers the early society and the house they eventually built for it.

The church is presumably named for James Preston Appleby, who gave four acres for the site. The Applebys were a prominent family along Wire Road, and the name is still on the land around the church. In 1862 Captain Morgan T. Appleby mustered a new infantry company in the churchyard; the company fought across the Southern states until 1865, and after the war he sat in the state Senate.

What does the church look like?

It is a one-story wooden meeting house, clapboard over a timber frame, set on low brick piers, with a medium gable roof now covered in asphalt shingles and a boxed cornice. The nomination describes it as an excellent example of the Greek Revival meeting house style, which in practice means a plain rectangular box with the proportions right and no ornament to speak of.

The front has two sets of double doors, each door with two panels, reached by three low brick steps. The rear repeats the front with a single set of doors. Each side wall has four evenly spaced nine-over-nine sash windows. The dimensions given in the local record are roughly 30 by 44 feet.

Inside, two rows of pews believed to be original flank a center aisle. During the 1970 Tricentennial someone put up signs marking the old seating order: gentlemen on the north side, ladies and courting couples on the south, and an Amen Corner to the northwest near the pulpit. The National Register calls the sanctuary virtually original and in unusually good condition, and the photographs since bear that out.

Who is buried in Appleby’s cemetery?

The cemetery that came with the nomination dates from the late nineteenth century and holds church founders, Wire Road families and, by the SC Picture Project’s account, graves of enslaved people. The Upper Dorchester County Historical Society’s Memorial Stones, a survey of inscriptions from 138 upper-county cemeteries, is the reference if you are looking for a name. Many of the stones are Applebys.

Visiting Appleby’s Methodist Church

  • Location: Wire Road at Cowtail Road, St. George, SC 29477; the state record places it at the junction of S.C. secondary roads 19 and 71 (GPS 33.137344, -80.651248). Roots and Recall gives the address as 4396 Wire Road.
  • Hours: The grounds and cemetery are open. The published sources do not list regular services or interior hours; the building is generally seen from outside unless a service or homecoming is on.
  • Cost: None.
  • Nearby: Koger-Murray-Carroll House, 1.7 miles up Wire Road; Westbury Homestead, 3.6 mi
  • From Charleston: About 60 miles northwest, roughly 1 hour 15 minutes by I-26 and U.S. 78, then south on Wire Road

Wire Road itself is worth the detour. It runs along the old stage road toward Augusta, and the church and the Koger house are the two oldest things on it. The county map on this site marks both, and the /history/ page puts them in order. The dispatches are fiction and do not go inside the church. The courting couples’ side has been empty for a long time, and the Amen Corner has not moved.

Sources