Lebanon Chapel AME Church
Bounded by Young St. on the West and Middle St. on the North, Fairhope, ALThe early Fairhopers believed in universal equality. Yet if their experiment was to survive in the deep South, it had to be for whites only. Relations between blacks and the Single-Taxers were cordial, though the former resided largely outside the southern city limits in the communities of Tatumville and Hbustonville. Some Single-Taxers, including E. B. Gaston, disapproved of black disenfranchisement and roundly condemned the Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s.. Blacks in Fairhope sought solace and strength not from well-meaning Utopians however, but from their
churches. Lebanon Chapel A.M.E. Church organized with some twenty members and began construction of a building in 1923. The project was supervised and carried through to completion by one of the congregation, Warren B. Pearson. Pearson was a mechanic and builder who lived just north of Fairhope in Volanta. His choice of ornamental concrete block for the new church was well within the building tradition then prevalent in Fairhope. The Courier contains no mention of the completion of the building, one of the finest churches in town. Lebanon Chapel A.M.E. Church continues to serve a small congregation of about fifty people.
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1988.
The National Register of Historic Places is the official list of the Nation’s historic places worthy of preservation. Authorized by the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966, the National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places is part of a national program to coordinate and support public and private efforts to identify, evaluate, and protect America’s historic and archeological resources.