Washington Chapel C.M.E. Church

Constructed between 1905 and 1907, the two-story, Late Gothic Revival limestone Washington Chapel C.M.E. Church in Parkville, Missouri, served as one of two African American churches serving the community of Parkville. The church served as an integral component of Parkville's historic Black community. Members of Parkville C.M.E. Church started meeting in 1870, gathering as a congregation at the Park College Presbyterian Church until it moved into a separate brick structure in 1877. Efforts to raise funds to construct a building on land owned by the church began in the 1880s. During this time, members worked to create a relationship with nearby Park College, which supported efforts to build the church as part of their plan to create a separate branch of the college for African American students. This plan for a separate annex of the college was considered progressive around the turn of the century, an era when schools and universities were segregated by law and educational opportunities in Missouri were limited to a few Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

White settlers and the people they enslaved arrived in Platte County after the Platte Purchase Treaty (signed in 1836 and ratified in 1837). Resembling Southern plantations, white settlers and those they enslaved grew hemp, which fostered rapid economic and population growth for the county. Enslaved people handled the arduous manual labor required to harvest hemp. By the 1850s, more than half of Missouri's enslaved population lived in twenty counties along the Missouri River, all of which were leading producers of hemp or tobacco. By 1860, African Americans comprised nearly one-quarter of Platte County's population. While very few white settlers could be considered abolitionists, a handful of white settlers opposed slavery in principle, including Parkville's founder, Colonel George S. Park.

In 1839, David and Stephan English established English Landing, a steamboat landing and logging warehouse on the Missouri River. One year later, in 1840, Colonel Park purchased the English brothers' interests and changed the settlement's name to Parkville. He platted the town in 1844, set aside land for a college, and constructed several buildings, including the Missouri Valley Hotel. However, Park eventually fled the city he founded because of the unpopularity of his antislavery views. In an 1854 editorial Park wrote for Industrial Luminary, the "Free Soil" newspaper he co-founded, Park affirmed his support for Kansas entering the Union as a free state. In response, a committee called the Kansas League broke into Park's newspaper office and destroyed the printing press, and they also threatened to hang Park and his partner if they did not leave town. 

Park moved back to Parkville after the Civil War when the hemp industry collapsed. At that time, some of the former white residents who had profited from the labor of the people they enslaved left the area. Park pursued his life-long ambition to establish a college with Christian-based pedagogy designed to educate young people of the American West, which included programs to have students do manual labor that helped offset the costs. Park persuaded Dr. John A. McAfee to come to Parkville to establish a Presbyterian college. In 1875, McAfee and seventeen students from Highland, Kansas, arrived and began conducting school in Colonel Park's hotel building; the College played a vital role in the development of Parkville. 

To the community of African Americans living in and around Parkville, the establishment of Park College meant an opportunity for employment and, eventually, education and church support. Both George Park, Chairman of the Board of Trustees, and John McAfee, President, believed Park College should work with local Black residents, including formerly enslaved people. As part of Park College's student work program, students worked alongside white and Black laborers to build Park College, including tasks from clearing land to constructing buildings. Dr. McAfee also became interested in providing higher education to African Americans, primarily through his contact with Father Blatchely, who had built an institution of higher education for recently emancipated slaves. One of his ambitions involved developing what was then referred to as a "Negro Annex" to the College, a reflection of school leaders who wanted to provide educational opportunity when integration was not legal in Missouri. The "Negro Annex" was to be located in the northwestern portion of Parkville, where Black residents made up the majority of the population by the late nineteenth century. McAfee acquired several plots of land in this area over the years so that by 1907, Park College owned a large percentage of the land in the area "across town" from campus, and it was in this location that the now-historic Washington Chapel was constructed in 1907. 

While Park College is deeply connected to Washington Chapel C.M.E., the history of the church, both nationally and in Platte County, goes back much further than the early twentieth century. Enslaved African Americans were rarely allowed to become full members of churches led by white ministers, but Black Americans developed their own religious institutions that grew into national networks of independent churches. Long before the Civil War and the end of slavery, free Black Americans also began to create religious institutions separate from their white counterparts. In the late 1700s, Richard Alien formed the Free African Society in Philadelphia, which led to the regional spread of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, which, in 1816, became the A.M.E. Church in Philadelphia. In 1844, a split occurred in the Methodist Church over slavery. In the North, separate Black congregations were allowed to organize and remain connected with the Methodist Episcopal Church. In the South, however, slaves usually worshiped in the churches of their masters. After Emancipation, the small African American membership, which remained in the Methodist Episcopal Church South, was permitted to organize a separate church. Thus, the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church (today the Christian Methodist Episcopal, or C.M.E, Church) was formed in 1870 in Jackson, Tennessee; the C.M.E. congregation in Parkville, Missouri, is closely associated with the establishment of this new denomination. 

The Parkville C.M.E. Church started meeting in 1870, gathering as a congregation at the Park College Presbyterian Church until it moved into a separate brick structure in 1877, possibly on land granted from Park College. The membership proliferated, leading its congregation to begin efforts in the 1880s to secure a permanent building that they owned. However, raising funds proved difficult. But, with the help of Park College and Howard McAfee (son of Dr. John McAfee), the present stone church building of the Washington Chapel C.M.E. Church building was finally begun in 1905. Charles Patrick Breen, the Superintendent of Buildings at Park College, supervised the construction using native limestone (quarried from the College grounds) and student labor. As with African American churches across the country after the Civil War, the Washington Chapel provided an organized religious life for the black community in Parkville. Churches also functioned as community centers and political meeting halls. 

After World War II, African American service members routinely moved to large cities instead of small towns or rural locations, leaving churches with declining memberships; many ceased operating. This was somewhat the case in Parkville, although the population shift and membership decline at the Chapel occurred later, and the church never folded. Alex Haley, the lauded author of Roots, twice visited the Washington Chapel during the 1960s. On October 22, 2022, the church celebrated its 187th Anniversary. 

"History of Park University." Park University. park.edu. Accessed January 21, 2023. https://catalog.park.edu/content.php?catoid=6&navoid=573.

Park University and Mathew Powers. "Mackay Hall." Clio: Your Guide to History. April 2, 2022. https://theclio.com/entry/31742.

Rau, Jean, Beverly A. Fleming, and Steven E. Mitchell. "Registration Form: Benjamin Banneker School." National Register of Historic Places. archives.gov. 1995. https://catalog.archives.gov/OpaAPI/media/63820016/content/electronic-records/rg-079/NPS_MO/95001115.pdf.

Wolfenbarger, Deon K. "Registration Form: Washington Chapel C.M.E. Church." National Register of Historic Places. mostateparks.com. 1992. https://mostateparks.com/sites/mostateparks/files/Washington%20Chapel%20CME%20Church.pdf.