History of the Rush Ridge Methodist Church



The Rush Ridge Methodist Church was organized in 1840.  The church became a part of the Methodist Episcopal Church, and later of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, when the church split prior to the Civil War. 

A list of the orginal members has not been found.

 

An almanac of 1859 describes the Methodist Churches in Mississippi County as follows:  The Methodist Church has two preachers in the county, the Rev. T. W. Mitchell at Charleston, and Rev. McKnight on the Wolf Island Circuit.  The have, in addition to their house in Charleston, a house upon the Lake, also places of worship at Concord, Norfolk, Rush’s Ridge, Lucas’ Bend, Wolf Island, Kay’s Chapel, and Long Prairie.  The church numbers about five hundred members in the county.” (Ref:  Betty F. Powell, History of Mississippi County Missouri, 1975, BNL Library Service)

 

The small one-room building of the church was located in the present-day cemetery, where the family plot of William Alfred Swank and Alma Fern Hankins Swank now sits. Sometime prior to13 July 1877 the building was destroyed (various versions say “blew down” or was burned).  A new building was erected in probably 1888 or 1889 on the same site.

 

Members who voted to rebuild and donated funds (as best can be derived from the rebuild charter) were:

 

Alfred Rush

J. H.? McGee

Jas. [James] Swank

J. H. Barker

Mary C. Meran

L.? J. Darlington?

John Allen

G. A. Maxfield

H.? B. Swank

Wm [William] Russel [Russell?]

Robert Vowels

Wm [Willliam] Grigsby

L. L. Maxfield

A. C.? Wyatt

J. S. Keen

J. W.? Lindsay

Thomas Vowels

(Unreadable)

W. M. Wyatt

D. M.? Caskry??

W. B. Hancock

J. C. & T. Cranshaw

J.? V. Hammon

W. H. Lusk

John Shively

Geo [George] McKinnick?

Ben Huff ?

A. E. Simpson

T. J. Harrison

N. H. Shin-----??

Alvin Ripperdam

E.? A. Pennebaker

Tho (Thomas) Fulkerson ?

E. W. Thompson

Michael Ripperdam

D. F. Goodin

Wm [William] Turner

Chas [Charles] French?

A. M. Griggs

A. T. Bird

T. P. Fields

A. J. Drinkwater

E. A. Parker

R. N.? Davis
G.? H.? Vowels J. S. Drinkwater

 

A. V. Goodin

 

(Names with a ? need additional validation. A copy of the original document can be found here Page 1 and here Page 2. An extraction from the document has been attempted here. If you have corrections, please contact us here and we will make the necessary changes.)

 

In the next few years, however, more people began attending the larger Methodist church in Wyatt—two miles southeast––and apparently some time between about 1905 and 1910, the Rush Ridge Methodist Church was disbanded.  The church building was moved a couple of hundred yards eastward across the concrete highway, where it formed the center of a residence. 

 

The cemetery, of course, remained.  Burials continued regularly through the 1920s, and less frequently thereafter.