| There were Methodists in St. Mary's County as early as 1785. But the county and circuit were not mentioned again in offical records until the years 1809-1811 when, with Prince George's County, it constituted a two-county circuit. Mr. Shermantine and Mr. Draper in their respective histories of the circuit say that a Mrs. Elizabeth Sanner founded Methodism in St. Mary's in 1817. At that time, St. Mary's would have been on the Bladensburg Circuit which extended from Bladensburg to Point Lookout. It is agreed that Ebenezer, built about 1820, was the oldest church.
Districts as well as circuits changed both in boundary and name but in 1857 when extant records begin St. Mary's Circuit, then on the Potomac District, was comprised of ten congregations. Amng these were churches and chapels named Bethel, Cedar Point, Ebenezer, Friendship, Joy, Mt. Pisgah, Mt. Zion, St. George's Island, and Wesley in Leonardtown. The latter had been sold to a debating society a decade before the Civil War.
The war brought great dissention to the churches. One church was burned, the parsonage lost, and the Bethel congregation joined the Southern Methodist. Mt. Pisgah was eventually sold and removed from its original site. Poverty of the area in years immediately following the war forced St. Mary's Circuit to become for a time a "mission" of the Conference.
Mrs. Helen Shermantine and her mother were instrumental in depositing the four record books with the Maryland Historical Society about 1921. These four volumes (MS. 722) were borrowed from the Maryland Historical Society for filmng by the Maryland State Archives.
For further information on the history of the Circuit, see Mr. Draper's account on pages 88-89 of the register for 1906-1921 and Mr. Shermantine's history found on pages 151-150 in the minutes of the Quarterly Conference, 1890-1906. |
