National Register Listing

Griffith's Chapel

a.k.a. Williamsville Methodist Church

Jct. of SR 442 and 443, Williamsville, DE

Griffith's Chapel is architecturally and historically significant as a highly evocative and well-preserved example of a small mid-19th century rural Methodist meeting house with a fine, unusual interior gallery. In its immediate locality, it is unexcelled as an icon not only of its functional type but of early community life. In the small, sparsely built crossroads community of Williamsville, only a few other 19th-century buildings still stand; they are residences, and do not approach the church either in the level of physical integrity or in institutional force. Seen in the larger context of southern Kent and Sussex counties, the church holds its own among surviving county churches, both in integrity and in architectural and historical significance. While the comprehensive survey data for southern Kent County has not yet been systematically evaluated, the initial review has uncovered no better examples of mid-19th-century churches that are equally well-preserved and equally elaborate at this very modest scale. In Sussex County, immediately to the south, a recently submitted nomination for Cool Spring Presbyterian Church emphasized an intact interior gallery as an unusual feature in the surviving early architecture of southern Delaware. Historically, Griffith's Chapel is particularly illustrative seen in connection with nearby Barratt's Chapel (N.R. 1972). This large and ambitious structure, built in brick in the late 18th century, has been called "The Gradle of Methodism" because it housed early meetings leading to the establishment of Methodism as a separate denomination. If Barratt's Chapel represents the cradle stage, then Griffith's Chapel represents the rural adolescence of American Methodism. Its simple, functional but affectionately decorated frame provided the necessary setting for circuit riders and lay preachers in a country congregation. For such congregations such churches succeeded the tent meetings and borrowed rooms of the early period; they proceeded the building boom in Methodist churches that followed the Civil War. On the basis of its architectural interest and integrity and of these illustrative qualities, Griffith's Chapel is nominated to the National Register on the basis of Criteria C and A: 1t embodies the distinctive characteristics of a type, period, or method of construction, and it is associated with events that have made a significant contribution to the broad patterns of our history."

From the time of the visit of John and Charles Wesley to Georgia in 1736-37 to the time of the Revolution, the efforts of Methodist missionaries had met with resistance from conservative adherents of the Church of England. In Delaware, however, the itinerant preachers met with considerable success. As noted above, that receptiveness was reflected in the building of Barratt's Chapel in 1780. In an era of difficult travel, however, congregations were necessarily local; smaller country meetings played an important role in nurturing Methodism on its way to becoming by far the largest denomination on the peninsula. Prior to 1850, Methodists in the southwestern part of Milford Hundred worshipped in the District 47 schoolhouse. The land for the first permanent Methodist Church in the area--a triangular lot, symbolic of the Methodist belief in the Trinity--was donated that year by W. T. Griffith. The trustees named the church in his honor.

Local significance of the building:
Listed in National Register of Historic Places in 1983.