Plymouth Congregational Church was founded in April 1867 by Black members of the Circular Congregational Church on Meeting Street, who were experiencing new freedom after the Civil War.[1] Active for more than 150 years, Plymouth was once one of the oldest Black Congregational churches in the South.
With the support of the American Missionary Association (AMA), the small group of African American Congregationalists, both born free and formerly enslaved, began meeting at the nearby Avery Institute, the first accredited secondary and teacher training school for Black Charlestonians. Rev. Francis Lewis Cardozo, Reconstruction-era politician and clergyman, helped form both the Avery Institute and the Plymouth congregation as an agent of the AMA.
A native Charlestonian born free in 1836, Rev. Francis Lewis Cardozo was born to Isaac Cardozo, a Sephardic Jewish father, a weigher in the City’s Customs House, and Lydia Weston, a formerly enslaved woman who gained her freedom in 1826 and worked as a seamstress.[2] The couple had a common law marriage but their union was not legally recognized because of laws prohibiting interracial marriage.[3] Rev. Cardozo was educated at the University of Glasgow in Scotland and studied in seminaries in Edinburgh and London, becoming an ordained Presbyterian minister.[4] He then worked as a minister at Temple Street Congregational Church in New Haven, Connecticut, before returning home to Charleston.[5]
Alongside his brother Thomas W. Cardozo and other prominent members of the Black community, Rev. Francis Cardozo was a founding principal of the Avery Institute in 1865.[6] He served as a delegate in the 1868 constitutional convention, chairing the education committee and advocating for a statewide system of integrated public education.[7] That same year, he was elected as Secretary of State, becoming the first African American in the United States elected to a statewide office.[8] Rev. Cardozo also oversaw the South Carolina Land Commission, which distributed land to thousands of formerly enslaved people in the 1870s and 1880s.[9]
Cardozo led the Plymouth Congregational Church for two years and was succeeded by Reverend James T. Ford. Under Ford’s leadership, three church trustees, Peter Mazyck, Thomas Cole, and William J. Brodie, purchased a former tannery at the corner of Pitt and Bull Streets from the estate of Smith Moury Jr. for the construction of Plymouth’s first church building in 1869. Plymouth Congregational Church was officially incorporated in 1870 by the General Assembly. The Sawner and Ferguson firm spearheaded the design and construction, and the Gothic Revival-style church was dedicated on March 10, 1872.[10]
Throughout the Reconstruction and the Jim Crow eras, Plymouth Congregational Church served as a community gathering place for worship, educational lectures, and civil rights activism. The church hosted interracial relations meetings in the early 1900s during the era of Jim Crow segregation.
The Queen Anne-style Plymouth Parsonage at 32 Bull Street, built in 1890 at the corner of Pitt and Bull Streets to the south of the Church building, was the home to church leaders, including Rev. George Clinton Rowe, Rev. C. S. Ledbetter, and many others, who were active in anti-lynching and equal rights campaigns.
In addition to being a minister, Rev. George Clinton Rowe (1853-1903) was an educator and a poet. Rev. Rowe penned “Our Heroes: Patriotic Poems on Men, Women and Sayings of The Negro Race” in 1890. He delivered the 1892 annual address at Claflin University, a historically Black Christian university in Orangeburg, in which he urged African Americans to establish their own schools to instill racial pride and provide role models for youth.[11] Rowe was also a founding trustee and principal of the Deming Industrial School, a school for African American students in the Town of Maryville (now part of West Ashley) in the 1890s.
Rev. C.S. Ledbetter (1878-1946) served as pastor for Plymouth Congregational Church for 25 years, and was very active in civic affairs. His 1946 obituary highlighted his many contributions to Charleston as a pioneer for the Black Boy Scout movement in Charleston, member of the advisory board of the Avery Institute, chairman of the Charleston chapter of the “Negro Auxiliary of the American Red Cross,” member of the interracial committee of the city, and more.[12]
Other Black activists visited Plymouth Congregational Church and its parsonage, including W.E.B. Du Bois, a founding member of the NAACP, in 1925, and Paul Robeson, a singer and activist, in 1948, while campaigning for presidential candidate Henry Wallace.
After 85 years, the congregation moved to a new mid-century modern church at 124 Spring Street in 1958. The Charleston Association for the Blind purchased the 41 Pitt Street building and engaged renowned African American architect and builder Herbert A. DeCosta, Jr. to complete renovations. Over the next four decades, the building underwent additional alterations and was rehabilitated as a private residence in 1997.
The 124 Spring Street church building was demolished in 2016, and Plymouth Church moved to its most recent location at 835 Magnolia Road in West Ashley.
[1] A Brief History of the Circular Church. Circular Congregational Church. (n.d.). https://www.circularchurch.org/history
[2] Burke, W. L. (2022, July 20). Cardozo, Francis Lewis. South Carolina Encyclopedia. https://www.scencyclopedia.org/sce/entries/cardozo-francis-lewis/; Ellison, V. (2024, July 3). July, 1868: Francis Cardozo is sworn in as South Carolina’s secretary of State. South Carolina Historical Society. https://schistory.org/july-1868-francis-cardozo-is-sworn-in-as-south-carolinas-secretary-of-state/
[3] Waldfogel, S. (2014, August 1). Jews and slavery: Isaac Cardozo and Lydia Weston. Jewish Book Council. https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/pb-daily/jews-and-slavery-isaac-cardozo-and-lydia-weston
[4] Burke, W. L. (2022, July 20). Cardozo, Francis Lewis.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Drago, Edmund L. Initiative, Paternalism, and Race Relations: Charleston’s Avery Normal Institute. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990.
[7] Burke, W. L. (2022, July 20). Cardozo, Francis Lewis.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] (1957, December 5). Charleston News and Courier, p. 23.
[11] Rowe, G. C., Claflin University & Daniel Murray Pamphlet Collection. (1892) The aim of life: live, learn, labor, love: annual address delivered at Claflin University, Orangeburg, S.C. Charleston, S.C.: Kahrs and Welch, Printers. [Pdf] Retrieved from the Library of Congress, https://www.loc.gov/item/91898207/.
[12] (1946, June 10). Charleston News and Courier, p. 8.