Celebrating Our East Side Community: 66 Hanover Street

Photo provided by Susan Williams

by Susan Millar Williams, Ph. D. 

Just three blocks north and west of the Palmer Campus, Vanderhorst Memorial Christian Methodist Episcopal Church was built in 1883 as a “mission chapel” to “meet the wants of Methodists living in the northeastern portion of the city,” especially workers in the new cotton factory that had recently opened its doors. (The cotton factory is now the building we know as the Cigar Factory.)

It was named Cumberland Methodist Church after the first Methodist church built in Charleston, which was located on Cumberland Street, downtown. That church had burned in the early nineteenth century, but the cornerstone was salvaged and re-installed in the new building on Hanover Street in a ceremony attended by the Mayor of Charleston and many other dignitaries. This “new” Cumberland Methodist Church was a large frame structure with a tin roof on four-foot brick pilings. The congregation was white.

In 1912 the building was purchased by a black congregation affiliated with the C.M.E. church. It was renamed in honor of C.M.E. Bishop Richard H. Vanderhorst, 1813-1872, who was born in Georgetown, South Carolina.

Want to learn more?

• For more on the history of the Hanover Street church, go to Vanderhorst Memorial’s website. 
• For a history of the C.M.E. denomination and a short biography of Richard Vanderhorst, see AfricanAmerican Religious Cultures by Stephen C. Finley and Torin Alexander (Santa Barbara, California: ABC-CLIO, 2009), which is available online through Google Books.