The town of McClellanville developed in the early-to-mid nineteenth century when landowner and town namesake Archibald McClellan divided his Pointe Plantation and sold lots to other planters from the St. James-Santee Parish. The planters built summer retreats along Jeremy Creek in the new village. After the Civil War, the rice industry collapsed due to the loss of slave labor. Planters then relocated to town and established new lives as merchants and fishermen.
Soon after the war churches began organizing in the burgeoning town of McClellanville. Presbyterians from Awendaw, first called Wappetaw, relocated to McClellanville and founded New Wappetaw Presbyterian Church. By 1890 Episcopalians from the Wambaw Church had built a chapel in town, St. James-Santee Episcopal Church, which then became the parishioners’ main sanctuary, rendering the edifice at Wambaw obsolete (though it still stands). By the turn of the twentieth century, Methodists desired their own church in the fishing village, and in 1902 McCllelanville United Methodist Church was built.
The Greek Revival church underwent a renovation in 1990 but appears essentially the same as it did when it was built. It remains an active church in the popular coastal community.
McClellanville UNited Methodist Church is listed in the National Register as part of the McClellanville Historic District:
The McClellanville Historic District contains a collection of approximately 105 residential, commercial, religious and educational properties dating from ca. 1860 to ca. 1935. This collection is architecturally significant as an illustration of the founding of a pineland resort village and its development into a small but stable year-round commercial fishing village. McClellanville begin in the late 1850s as a summer retreat for St. James Santee and Georgetown planters. The prevailing vernacular forms, especially the central hall farmhouse, predominated in early McClellanville architecture, although the more fashionable architectural styles began to receive attention and can be seen throughout the town: Carpenter Gothic, Queen Anne, and Italianate with a rare Colonial Revival example. The commercial strip developed in the early 20th century and are of frame construction built directly on the road. The historic district is visually unified by the nearly ubiquitous wooden frame construction, by the consistent scale of the house, lots, and their relation to the banks of the creek, by the tremendous live oak trees that permeate the town, and by the relative absence of contemporary commercial intrusions.
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