City Directories and History: The Cedar Grove Plantation Chapel (c. 1850), now at All Saints’ Episcopal Church, Waccamaw, was subsequently the Summer Chapel, All Saints’ Episcopal Church, and still later the Chapel of St. John-the-Evangelist, All Saints’ Episcopal Church. It is significant as an intact example of mid-nineteenth century vernacular church architecture. It is also significant for its association with the institution of slavery on antebellum rice plantations in Georgetown County and for its association with All Saints’ Episcopal Church. All Saints’, established in 1739, was one of the most significant Episcopal churches in the South Carolina lowcountiry in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The church, which served many of Georgetown County’s leading rice planters in the antebellum era, was particularly prosperous in the period 1830-1860. An Episcopal committee report just after the Civil War described the antebellum parish as “containing more wealth than any other rural parish in South Carolina, or perhaps in the South. There were the homes of the largest rice planters on the continent.” Reverend Alexander Glennie, a native of England, served as rector of All Saints’ during this period, and established a ministry to slaves on the rice plantations of Georgetown County. Glennie had come to South Carolina as a tutor to Plowden C.J. Weston, the young son of rice planter Francis Marion Weston. The younger Weston later encouraged Glennie’s work among the slaves, and supervised the construction of a large slave chapel – St. Mary’s – at Hagley, his plantation on the Waccamaw River. Other planters also supported Glennie’s mission, and eventually built thirteen slave chapels in which he preached. “Glennie preached to slaves on one plantation each Sunday afternoon and another on Sunday evening,” notes one historian of All Saints’ Parish, “and he held services three or four evenings a week as well. He was thus able to visit each plantation in the parish once or twice a month. When he began his mission, he had ten black communicants; by 1862 there were 529.”…. (Courtesy of the SC Dept. of Archives and History)
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