The old Methodist meeting house — a 1790 chapel on its third address

Written August 2026 · Sources last checked 2 August 2026 · Corrections: hello@lewestown.com

Built at the beginning of American Methodism

A meeting house raised by Lewes Methodists in 1790 was built at a very particular moment. The Methodist Episcopal Church had been organised in the United States only in 1784, at the Christmas Conference in Baltimore, and Francis Asbury — one of its first two bishops — was in the middle of the four and a half decades of circuit riding that carried the denomination across the new republic.

Early Methodist meeting houses were deliberately plain: a preaching box, not a sanctuary. The theology was itinerant and evangelical, the congregations were often poor, and the architecture matched. That plainness is exactly why so few survive — a small undistinguished frame building is the easiest thing in a town to knock down.

Moved twice, and saved by becoming a house

This one survived by ceasing to be a chapel. It now rests on its third site, at 214 Mulberry Street, restored as a dwelling. Its restoration, in Mrs. Brittingham’s account, rescued the denomination’s 1790 meeting house from impending doom and produced a home for its owners in the process.

That is an underrated conservation route. A congregation that grows builds a bigger church and the old one becomes surplus; the building then survives only if someone finds a new use for it. Conversion to a dwelling has saved more small early chapels than any preservation society, at the cost of public access — this is somebody’s home, and it is not open to visitors.

Methodism in Lewes

Lewes sits in a part of Delaware where Methodism took hold early and deeply. Bishop Asbury travelled the peninsula repeatedly, and the evangelist George Whitefield — the Anglican priest whose open-air preaching helped ignite the Great Awakening, and who first reached the American colonies in 1738 — also passed through the region during the revivals of the eighteenth century.

Our page on faith in Lewes covers Asbury, Whitefield and the growth of Methodism here in more detail. This building is the physical residue of that history: not a monument, just a plain frame box that people once filled.

From the original page at this address

“Restoration of an eighteenth-century Lewes, Delaware, building has produced more than a lovely dwelling for its owners. Methodists in the community can marvel at the transformation which rescued from impending doom their denomination’s 1790 meeting house located at 214 Mulberry Street. Now resting on its third site …”

Hazel D. Brittingham, “The Old Methodist Meeting House”, Lewestown Publishers, 1997. © Copyright 1997 Hazel D. Brittingham. Short extract quoted for commentary; the full original is at the Internet Archive.