National Register Listing

Byrd's AME Church

Smyrna Ave., Clayton, DE

Byrd's A. M. E. Church was built on the outskirts of Clayton in 1894, by a local Black community whose members had previously then been walking several miles out in the country to worship. The small, picturesque, little-altered Queen Anne style church stands today as an evocative architectural image of one of the major community experiences of Black Delawareans in the Clayton area. Indeed, since even after the abolition of slavery Blacks were subject to discriminatory policies and practices which prevented their equal participation in the wider society, Black churches became institutions not only of major but of e unparalleled importance. They were virtually the only extra-familial, extra local institutions of which Black people were in control. Therefore, among the early buildings of a Black community a nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century church will always be a building of unusual associative power. In Clayton, Byrd's Church holds this position. Further, it has the stylistic ambition of a building as beautiful as a people of modest financial means could make it. Because of the degree of integrity with which this original style and its setting have survived, it is a particularly effective carrier of its associations both with the wider A. M. E. movement, and with the particular historical needs and personalities that brought his local church into being. These qualities render it significant in terms of National Register criteria A and C: that is, for its association with events which made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of the local past, and for its embodiment of the distinctive characteristics of a type and period. Because its primary significance rests on these qualities, it is nominated to the National Register as an exception to the usual ineligibility of properties owned and used by religious organizations.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1982.