First Came the Churches: St. Lawrence and Macedonia, Eatonville’s Twin Anchors
St. Lawrence A.M.E. (1881) and Macedonia Missionary Baptist (1882) predate Eatonville's charter — the first ten acres of the town went to a congregation, and the mayor's daughter grew up in Macedonia's pews. The story of the town's two founding churches.
3 minute read
Eatonville was a town with a charter in 1887, but it was a community with churches six years earlier. St. Lawrence A.M.E. and Macedonia Missionary Baptist — founded in 1881 and 1882, before incorporation, before the Hurstons arrived, before there was a town to be the churches of — are the oldest continuously operating institutions in Eatonville, and they explain the place better than any marker. In a town founded by freedpeople, the congregations came first because the congregations were the founding.
St. Lawrence A.M.E.: the first ten acres
When Joseph E. Clark and Lewis Lawrence assembled the land that became Eatonville, the first ten acres went to the trustees of St. Lawrence African Methodist Episcopal Church, organized in 1881 — a fact preserved in the town’s histories and in BlackPast’s account of the founding. The congregation’s original site is where the Thomas House, Eatonville’s oldest surviving structure, now stands on Taylor Avenue. Preservation surveys describe St. Lawrence as the town’s oldest continuously operating institution, and its arc tracks Eatonville’s own: founded by people who had been enslaved, worshipping on land they held in common, six years before there was a municipality to protect it. The church still serves the community today, a few steps from the Moseley House, whose mistress, Matilda Moseley, taught Sunday school and played the piano for Eatonville’s congregations.
Macedonia: the mayor’s pulpit
Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church was organized in 1882 by freedpeople of the Baptist faith, making it Eatonville’s second-oldest congregation — its own published history and its state historical marker agree on the date and the distinction. Its earliest recorded pastor, the Reverend Joe Richards, served from 1895; among the ministers who followed in the pulpit’s first half-century were the brothers John and Isaac Hurston. John Hurston — elected Eatonville’s mayor in 1897, called to Macedonia’s pulpit in 1902 — was a carpenter-preacher whose sermons his daughter Zora studied the way other writers study craft. He became the model for the preacher father in her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, and Macedonia became, in her Eatonville, simply “the largest church,” the institution against which the town measured itself.
The congregation built on Calhoun Street at Kennedy Boulevard in the 1940s and dedicated its current sanctuary in 1994 — a thousand-seat church with the older sanctuary, named for former pastor Peter L. Lias, joined to it. On the town’s heritage trail, Macedonia is marker number nine, a short walk from the Hurston homestead marker on the trail route.
The congregations’ influence runs through everything else on the boulevard. Eatonville’s preservation movement grew out of church networks; the Association to Preserve the Eatonville Community’s founding generation were church people, and Macedonia’s own history records the congregation calling the young Reverend Willie C. Barnes as pastor in October 1987 — the same season P.E.C. organized to save Kennedy Boulevard from widening. The festival’s structure still bows to the churches: it opens with education, celebrates on Saturday, and gives Sunday back to reflection and worship. To understand why a town of 2,300 people has repeatedly out-organized a county school district and a state road plan, start with the fact that it has been practicing collective decision-making in these two sanctuaries since before it had a charter.
Visiting living churches
Both congregations are active churches, not exhibits, and Eatonville asks visitors to hold that distinction. Sunday services are the town’s heartbeat — the Day of Reflection that closes the ZORA! Festival each January leans on exactly this tradition — and a traveler who attends as a respectful guest, dressed for church and ready to stay for the whole service, will understand Eatonville faster than a day of markers can teach it. Start with the Eatonville hub for the town’s full story, and locate both churches on the Orlando Top Spots Map. The town that freedom built was, first of all, a town that gathered. It still does.
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