11500 Garners Ferry Road
Good Hope Baptist Church
Good Hope Baptist Church is among the few remaining rural antebellum churches today. Constructed in 1857 “for the distant poor and other members” on land deeded from James Seay, Good Hope Baptist Church began as a branch of Congaree Baptist Church and became a separate congregation in 1866. The building remains as a tangible link to a period in which the architecture of segregation played a major role in social interaction. Its second-floor gallery was designed to seat enslaved laborers away from their white owners, who worshipped on the main floor.
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Good Hope Baptist Church, February 1993. Image courtesy South Carolina Department of Archives and History, State Historic Preservation Office
