Remember When, Chattanooga? Trinity Methodist Church thrived on McCallie Avenue

Chattanooga News-Free Press archive photo via ChattanoogaHistory.com / This 1960 photo shows the former Trinity Methodist Church on McCallie Avenue. The congregation later merged with Woodmore Methodist Church and moved to North Moore Road in 1966.
Chattanooga News-Free Press archive photo via ChattanoogaHistory.com / This 1960 photo shows the former Trinity Methodist Church on McCallie Avenue. The congregation later merged with Woodmore Methodist Church and moved to North Moore Road in 1966.

In 1960, the year the accompanying photograph was made, Trinity Methodist Church was one of the dozens of houses of worship that made McCallie Avenue a great canyon of churches.

The church, at the corner of Park and McCallie avenues, was established in 1899 in what was then "a thickly settled residential area," according to newspaper archives.

During the next century, it served as home for several congregations, including Tucker Baptist Church and the Living Word Church. Part of the building, which had been unoccupied since 2009, collapsed in 2011.

"Fortunately, there were no reported injuries, just the loss of much of the facility, requiring demolition," the Chattanooga Free Press editorial page reported in May 2011. The lot, 860 McCallie Ave., is owned by the city of Chattanooga, according to records.

The Free-Press editorial noted the building was designed by famed Chattanooga architect R. H. Hunt, who also designed the Soldiers and Sailors Memorial Auditorium, the Joel W. Solomon Federal Building and Courthouse, and the Hamilton County Courthouse.

By the early 1960s, when this photograph was taken, Trinity Methodist had more than 300 members on its rolls, and by mid-decade, the church merged with Woodmore Methodist Church to form Trinity-Woodmore Methodist Church. In 1966, the congregation moved to North Moore Road, where a new church was built, according to news reports.

Adjacent to the McCallie Avenue church building in this 1960 photo is Alsobrook Upholstering Co.

This photo is part of a collection of News-Free Press images shown at ChattanoogaHistory.com, a photography-based website curated by local history enthusiast Sam Hall.

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ChattanoogaHistory.com

Launched by history enthusiast Sam Hall in 2014, ChattanoogaHistory.com is maintained to present historical images in the highest resolution available. If you have photo negatives, glass plate negatives or original nondigital prints taken in the Chattanooga area, contact Sam Hall for information on how they may qualify to be digitized and preserved at no charge.

Contact Mark Kennedy at mkennedy@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-645. Follow him on Twitter @tfpcolumnist.

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