meeting. 25 Efforts to route a railroad through the village succeeded. East on Main Street, L.D. operated a business at the corner of New Market Road. 26 After the railroad was built through the village, the business moved to near the railroad depot. Louisa Jane and her neighbor Elizabeth had more in common than Maryland ancestry. They were young when they married and married men much older than themselves. They also were the only founders whose mothers were not widows. And they married men who were either Methodists or would become Methodists. 27 What probably started as on-going conversations in the Byrd home between Elizabeth and Emily Osborn, who lived and worked there, about how better to help disabled adults like Elizabeth’s stepson and Emily’s sister grew to include two more women, each inviting one to an informal meeting at the Byrd home. Emily invited her sister-in-law Eliza Osborn. Elizabeth invited Louisa Jane. What could Louisa Jane contribute? Possibly she could tell stories she had heard about help from church members and circuit-riding pastors to her family after her mother died. Such help may have led her father to become a leader with others in establishing a Methodist church near the family home. 28 She also could contribute personal qualities such as “strong and positive convictions.” 29 As the group continued to meet and expand its membership, a church historian wrote that they may have become a class meeting, a John Wesley 25 “Rail Road Meeting,” The (Abbeville, South Carolina) Banner , 21 October 1846, online archives (https://www.newspapers.com) : 26 July 2020), p. 2, cols. 2-3. 26 The Centennial History Committee, compilers, A Centennial History of the First Presbyterian Church, Greenwood, South Carolina, 1883-1983 (Columbia: The R.L. Bryan Company, 1983), 8. 27 “Greenwood News,” The Abbeville (South Carolina) Press and Banner , 2 September 1885, online archives, (https://www.newspapers.com : 26 July 2020), last item, p. 3, col. 2. Also, William Parks obituary, Southern Christian Advocate (Charleston, South Carolina) , 2 February 1841, p. 140, col. 1, South Carolina United Methodist Collection, Wofford College, Spartanburg. 28 Sketch #46 “Shiloh” in Benjamin T. Carlton, Abbeville County’s Rural Churches, 1939: Ben Carlton’s WPA Sketches & Notes (Due West, South Carolina: Privately printed. 1993), n.p. 29 “Merriman,” obituary, p. 6, col. 4. Rev. R.E. Stackhouse was pastor of Greenwood Methodist Church 1889-1891. See Mays, Main Street , 59-62.
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