Suttons United Methodist Church

When Scots-Irish immigrants settled in Williamsburgh District (now Williamsburg County) in the early eighteenth century, they wasted no time establishing Presbyterian churches. As a result, the denomination became, well, dominant, and few other sects were organized in this area until the mid-nineteenth century. The lone exception was Methodism, which began to take root in less-populated portions of the Pee Dee as early as the 1820s.

Suttons United Methodist Church in Andrews was one of those early Methodist churches, established in 1825. It was the second Methodist church founded in Williamsburg County, following Ebenezer United Methodist in Hemingway, which formed in 1822. In 1825 Robert Sutton donated a lot for the building of a Methodist church, and a frame meeting house was soon erected on this site. The church even appears on the 1825 Robert Mills Atlas of South Carolina as “Suttons M.H.”

Methodist camp meetings, where people who otherwise had no access to a church gathered in rural areas to listen to circuit-riding preachers, were common events in the South during the early days of Methodism in the United States. Such camp meetings were held on this church’s property from 1825 to around 1860, as the meeting house was too small to house such a large event. In 1884 the meeting house was replaced with another frame building, which served the congregation until the middle of the twentieth century. It was torn down to erect the current brick church in 1953.