The Civil War battles for Chattanooga hadn’t begun in 1863 when seven black residents met at Dent Farm, now a part of the Bonny Oaks Industrial Park, to establish Mount Calvary Baptist Church.
Next month, one of the oldest black congregations in the area – two years younger than St. Elmo Missionary Baptist Church and three years older than First Baptist, East Eighth Street (originally Shiloh Baptist) – will celebrate its 150th anniversary.
The Rev. Robert Freeman, pastor since 2007, says the founders of the church had a “generosity of sharing of their own personal wealth to get the church established.”
“They had an abiding faith in God,” he says, “realizing he is the source of all the benefits and blessings. Because of those blessings, they shared them.”
Mount Calvary made its first home, a boxlike structure with shutters for windows and hollowed-out logs for pews, along what is now Noah Reid Road near the Friar Branch of Chickamauga Creek.