Original Church Site

First Site of Antioch (East) Baptist Church, 1877 to 1916

Located between 420 and 432 Oakdale Road, this marker commemorates the original building site of Antioch (East) Baptist Church, 1877–1916. The current property owners and neighbors have underwritten markers here honoring the significance of this early African American Legacy site. A commemorative granite bench was placed in 2011 and the Legacy Marker in 2013. Its text follows:

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This marker reaffirms a community of hundreds of African American residents who lived in early Edgewood–Candler Park from 1870 to the 1980s.

Welcome!  As you enjoy the stone bench and greenspace here, imagine a sunny Sunday morning long ago.  In the late 1870s, a small lot, 50 feet to the left of this exhibit, held the first sanctuary of the Antioch (East) Baptist Church, an early congregation of freed African Americans in Georgia after the Civil War. Antioch members met here under a “brush harbor” on property owned by their first pastor, the Reverend Alexander L. Bryan(t).

By 1883, the Antioch congregation had built a one-story wooden church building on the 40-foot x 60-foot lot. Antioch purchased the land from the Reverend Bryan(t) for $1, with the deed restricting its use to “church and school purposes only.”

A Church in Flames

In July 1916, this well-established African American church burned to the ground.  Details of the fire remain mysterious; no hard evidence of arson or accident has come to light.  In the harsh “Jim Crow” era of strict segregation, with an active Ku Klux Klan nearby, Antioch Baptist Church could not litigate—but church leaders drew their own conclusions.

By 1922, church members had hand-built a new sanctuary one block east—this time made of stone.  The granite building served as Antioch East Baptist Church from 1918 to 1950.  This Old Stone Church still stands at 470 Candler Park Drive.  In 1950, under pressures from segregation, Antioch East relocated south of the railroad tracks, where it continued as a thriving congregation at 1223 Hardee Street in Edgewood until 2019, when it moved to 2352 Old Rex Morrow Road in Ellenwood, Georgia.