Barratt's Chapel
N of Frederica on U.S. 113, Frederica, DEIn the summer of 1780 Philip Barratt gave the Methodist Society a plot of land, near the Murderkill River in Kent County, Delaware. The two-story brick meeting house, named in honor of Barratt, was begun immediately.
Barratt's Chapel was the first church in Kent County that was built especially for Methodist worship, and one of the first two erected in Delaware.
For two generations, the interior remained in an unfinished condition, with only dirt floors and no heat; in spite of these primitive conditions, Barratt's Chapel was the best meeting house in America belonging to the Methodists as a house of worship. St. George's in Philadelphia was, at this time, serving as a barracks and stable for the British army.
"Barratt's Chapel today is known as the "Cradle of American Methodism" because of its unique place in the development of the denomination/ It was here that Dr. Thomas Coke and the Reverend Francis Asbury, later the first two Methodist bishops, met to make the preliminary arrangements for the formation of the Methodist
Episcopal Church in America. Here the sacramental ordinances were first administered to Methodist communicants on American soil by duly authorized Methodist ministers, Dr. Coke and the Reverend Richard
Whatcoat.
According to Scharf's History of Delaware, "The edifice was forty two by forty-eight feet, two stories high, and had a vestry room connected with it.
There is a tradition that the brick of which it was built were imported from Holland, which is improbable, as the clay in the immediate vicinity is as good as any in the world for bricks and the art of making bricks was already well-known... The house was furnished with a pulpit and occupied as a place of worship... The old fashioned high pulpit which was reached by a flight of steps and which almost concealed the preacher from his congregation has been remodeled to suit modern ideas; but the seat or wooden bench, upon which Bishops Coke and Asbury, and other pioneers of the church, sat, is still preserved as a memento For the first sixty years of its existence the ground was the only flooring and the walls were left in an uncouth and primitive state."
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1972.
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.