Old White Meeting House Summerville SC: Ruins & Cemetery

The Old White Meeting House is a brick ruin and working cemetery on Dorchester Road (SC 642), about half a mile southeast of SC 165 near Summerville. A wooden meeting house went up here in 1696, a brick one around 1700, and what you see today is the shell of the 1794 rebuild after the 1886 Charleston earthquake knocked it down. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on February 8, 2005, and is still owned by the congregation that built it, now Summerville Presbyterian Church.

Who built the White Meeting House?

Congregationalists. In December 1695 a party from Dorchester, Massachusetts came south on the schooner Friendship with their minister, Rev. Joseph Lord, and settled on the upper Ashley River. Summerville Presbyterian’s history gives the arrival date as December 5, 1695. They laid out the town of Dorchester nearby and in 1696 built a wood-frame meeting house. By about 1700 they had replaced it in brick.

They named it for Rev. John White of Dorchester, England, the minister the Massachusetts Dorchester settlers regarded as their spiritual father. So the name runs Dorchester to Dorchester to Dorchester, England to Massachusetts to Carolina, and the county still carries it.

The building followed the standard colonial meeting house plan: square, about 30 by 30 feet as rebuilt, brick covered in stucco, with a pyramidal roof. No steeple. Congregationalists were “dissenters,” and after the Church Act of 1706 made the Church of England the colony’s official faith, the Anglicans built their own parish church a short distance away. That is St. George’s, whose bell tower still stands at Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site, about 1.8 miles from here.

The 1753 departure

In 1753 a large part of the congregation left. They had received two land grants totaling 32,000 acres on the Midway River in Georgia, and they went, founding what became Midway Congregational Church in Liberty County. The ones who stayed kept the meeting house going on the Ashley.

Burned in 1781, rebuilt in 1794

During the Revolution, Dorchester was a contested place. Most of the town burned in 1781, the meeting house with it. By 1788 the town was nearly empty. The congregation rebuilt the meeting house in 1794, in brick, on the old footprint.

By then Summerville was growing a few miles north on sandy, well-drained ground where planters’ families spent the sick season away from the river. In 1831, the same year the South Carolina Railroad came through, the congregation built a new church in town and named it Summerville Presbyterian. The White Meeting House was left to the dead.

How did the 1886 earthquake affect the ruins?

The Charleston earthquake struck on the night of August 31, 1886. Its epicenter was close to Middleton Place, a few miles down the Ashley, which puts Dorchester County, not Charleston, at the center of the event. The old brick meeting house, already a century old and unused for fifty years, came down. What survived is what you see now: parts of all four corners, the tallest about nine feet, and enough of the foundation walls to read the square plan on the ground.

The congregation’s first church in Summerville was damaged in the same quake and condemned in 1894; the present sanctuary at 407 South Laurel Street dates to 1895.

The cemetery

The cemetery surrounds the ruin in a plain grid with little landscaping, a gated entrance, and a few hardwoods and evergreens shading particular family plots. Markers are mostly granite and marble tablets, obelisks and table-top stones. The earliest marked graves date to the 1760s; most burials are nineteenth century. The National Register lists the cemetery as a contributing resource on the 5.8-acre site.

It is still an active burial ground. People are buried here now, by families who have been burying here for two and a half centuries. That is worth remembering before you walk it.

Can you visit the Old White Meeting House?

Location: SC 642 (Dorchester Road), about 0.5 miles southeast of the SC 165 junction, Summerville, SC 29485. GPS 32.965693, -80.194699. About 20 miles northwest of Charleston, roughly 35 minutes by car.

The ruins and cemetery are private property owned and managed by Summerville Presbyterian Church. They are not part of Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site, though the two are close enough to see on one trip.
Visitors have reported that the cemetery gate is kept locked and that entry requires permission and a combination from the church. Call the church office before you drive out. Do not climb the fence.
There is no admission, no staff on site, and no restroom.
The church does not publish a burial list; by one account it will confirm a specific name if you ask.
Colonial Dorchester State Historic Site, 300 State Park Road, is the better stop if you want a walkable site with interpretation, the St. George’s bell tower, and Fort Dorchester’s tabby walls.

Where this fits in the county

The oldest congregation in Dorchester County did not begin in a church. It began on this square of brick, with a Massachusetts accent, and moved to town when the railroad made town worth moving to. The county history page follows the line from here to Summerville, and the dispatch /the-tower-with-no-bell/ sits a mile and a half down the same road at the Anglican tower that outlasted its rivals. The county map marks both.

Thirty feet square, four corners, nothing in the middle. The county line is drawn in the same way, and holds about as well.

The Old White Meeting House: What Is Left of 1696 on Dorchester Road