Goosebumps rose on Shana Robinson’s arms as she recalled her childhood memories of Sunday morning services at Hebron Presbyterian Church, which was built by formerly enslaved people on Johns Island.
She recalled sitting on the front pew in the two-story wooden church with her family as churchgoers vigorously fanned themselves with paper fans bearing a funeral home ad and a picture of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
For added relief from the summer heat, ushers raised the windows to let in a cool ocean breeze, Robinson remembers. Through the windows, a jubilant chorus of songs, foot-stomping and clapping wafted along Bohicket Road.
Robinson’s recollections from the early 1980s are typical for many churchgoers in sea island communities. Her experience and those of her fellow church members, however, occurred in a historic sanctuary with an atypical beginning that recently gained a new designation.
On the national list
Earlier this summer, Hebron Presbyterian Church, which is now called the Hebron Center, was added to the National Register of Historic Places, said the Rev. Patricia Bligen Jones, pastor of Hebron Zion Presbyterian Church on Bohicket Road.
The Hebron congregation in the late 1970s moved to a brick church next to the old wooden church that now fronts a scenic Betsy Kerrison Parkway. In 1990, that congregation merged with Zion Presbyterian Church on Johns Island to form Hebron Zion, which currently has 167 people on the church’s membership roll, Jones said.
Following the merger of two Presbyterian congregations, Jones joined the church in 2018 to follow her childhood pastor on Edisto Island and mentor, the late Rev. McKinley Washington, who had been the church’s interim pastor after he served in the South Carolina Senate.
When Jones saw the historic Hebron church, she immediately decided “this building needs to be listed [on the national registry] because of its historic significance.”
In October, the congregation plans to affix a shiny commemorative bronze marker on the building to identify it as a historic site, she said. The church also plans to upgrade the building and use it for educational programs, cultural events and meetings, Jones said.
As a longtime member of the church and Johns Island resident, Robinson said, “I am honored to be a part of this history as a member of the old Hebron. It was something about worshiping there that brought so much joy to me.”
The old Hebron Church joins Johns Island Presbyterian Church on Fort Johnson Road as the only churches on the island with the national designation, said Brad Sauls, supervisor of registration, grants and local government assistance at the S.C. Department of Archives and History.
Hebron is one of 26 Black churches in South Carolina that are listed individually as a historic site, he said. More Black churches within historic districts are also on the list, he added.
A tangled history
The written record shows the Hebron church was built around 1885 by people who were enslaved on the Gregg Plantation, according to an extensive 45-page nomination application to the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Hebron’s history, entwined with the White Presbyterian church, however, began before 1885. The church’s original building, which no longer stands, was built in 1874 on the former Gregg Plantation not far from the current Hebron Center.
The Black congregation informally organized itself around 1866 and held services in “bush tents” before the first church was constructed, according to the application.
In 1873, the Presbyterian Church in the USA Committee of Missions for Freedmen, a White organization, formally established the Black congregation, according to the application.
Because of this link between the first building in 1874 and the second church built 11 years later, Hebron is the best architectural example of a Black rural church on Johns Island, the application said.
Promise Land Reformed Episcopal Church, built around 1875, is also one of the oldest Black churches on the island, the application said. It is also on Betsy Kerrison Parkway.
An oral tradition
Not all of Hebron’s history was written. In the sea island tradition of passing down history orally, Robinson said her grandfather, Leon Simmons Sr., and her mother, Josephine Robinson, told her that after the Civil War the newly freed people who organized the church built the first church from lumber salvaged from a shipwreck on Kiawah Island.
It’s possible that pieces of the first Hebron church, built in 1874, may have been used to construct the second sanctuary in 1885, said architectural historian Brittany Tulla. She owns BVL Historic Preservation Research in Charleston that prepared the nomination application for the church.
A National Park Service (NPS) grant established to document the history of Black churches in South Carolina paid for the work, Sauls said.
Tulla said during the 100 hours that she and others spent researching the church’s history, they also heard the shipwreck story.
“We know how important oral history is to the culture on Johns Island,” she said. But the shipwreck story is not mentioned in the report because the NPS required the researchers to focus on the existing church, she explained.
The second Hebron church building from 1885, she added, is one of the largest historic Black churches on the island, and it resembles the architectural “high style” of Johns Island Presbyterian Church.
The original trustees and congregants of Hebron had been enslaved by the families who organized Johns Island Presbyterian Church, she said.
“We know there was a relationship under bondage,” she said. “If we had more time, we could dig even deeper.”
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