Annual service set at historic church
Trinity Espiscopal Church
The annual service of the Trinity Episcopal Church, Society Hill, will be held at the historic church on Burns Street in Society Hill April 28 at 4 p.m. In charge of the service will be Rector of St. David’s Episcopal Church in Cheraw, Rev. Mary Ellen Doran.
Trinity Episcopal Church was consecrated April 25, 1834. Several prominent local families founded the church: Judge Josiah James Evans, U.S. senator; Col. Nicholas Williams, John Dick Witherspoon, Major John DeWitt, Enoch Hanford, Edward Edwards, John McCollough and Julia Hawes.
The simple wooden structure is distinguished by its bell tower, as well as its impressive Gothic Revival windows, predating most significant Gothic Revival architecture in the state by a decade.
Among its ministers were Rev. Ulysses M. Wheeler, a New Jersey native who served several churches in Mississippi and Louisiana as “domestic missionary” in the 1830s prior to settling in Society Hill, and Rev. Moses Ashley Curtis (1808-1872). Born in Stockbridge, Mass., Rev. Curtis served Trinity from 1847 to 1856.
Curtis achieved international renown as a botanist, discovering and naming many American plants, and published widely in scientific journals from 1835 until his death. He served on the committee that selected the site for the University of the South in Sewanee, Tennessee, in 1857.
During the 1870s the original organ was sold to St. John’s Episcopal Church in Florence, and a new organ manufactured by W.B.D. Simons and Co. of Boston was installed. In 1999 a bestowal by Society Hill native Circuit Judge John Jamison made possible the restoration of the Simons pipe organ to its original condition.
The cemetery contains one of the earliest plantings of camellias in Darlington County, made possible by a bequest of Edward McIntosh in 1872. The plants were purchased from the Fruitland Nursery of Prosper Julius Berckmans of Augusta, Ga. The nursery, established in 1857, is now the Augusta National Golf Course and Clubhouse.
As the church was never wired for electricity or gas, it remains much as it was throughout the 19th century. It retains its original box pews, as well as the rough benches in the slave gallery above. The only significant interior alterations have been the addition of the chancel before 1865, and the installation of the Simons organ.