OUR HISTORY

The Hebron Presbyterian Church on Johns Island was organized in 1865 at the end of the Civil War, near Gregg Plantation. The first building was constructed in 1868 using shipwreck lumber found floating on Seabrook and Kiawah beaches by formerly enslaved carpenters and founding members of the church, Jackson McGill and John Chisholm. Under the leadership of the Reverend Ishmael Moultrie, the congregation went from worshipping under a bush tent to a new building in April 1970.

The church was formed when a small group of freed slaves, frustrated by the refusal of the White leaders of the local Presbyterian church to help establish their own autonomous church, submitted a petition to the Presbyterian synod in 1867 to establish a "Freedman’s church", a church erected by and for Black people. A secular tug of war then commenced in cities across the state as White elders fought to retain total control of the Presbyterian Church. Former slaves living in rural isolation were not subject to such intense scrutiny by the parochial white parishioners’ governing the church. The builders of Hebron Presbyterian Church did not wait for the church's official blessing and completed work on their church.

Blacks attending the White Presbyterian church of Johns Island during slavery constituted the membership of the original Hebron Presbyterian Church. After reconstruction, the White Presbyterian Church of the South dropped all Blacks, causing them to find a place of their own in which to worship. Most of the former slaves were determined to remain with the Presbyterian faith so they met in a bush tent, singing and praying. At that time, Moultrie went about organizing Black Presbyterian churches as mission churches to the Northern Presbyterian Church, now the Presbyterian Church USA (PCUSA).