Macedonia Baptist Church (Burlington, Ohio)

Macedonia Church
U.S. National Register of Historic Places
Front of the church
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Nearest city	Burlington, Ohio
Coordinates	38°26′22.5″N 82°31′46″W / 38.439583°N 82.52944°W / 38.439583; -82.52944Coordinates: 38°26′22.5″N 82°31′46″W / 38.439583°N 82.52944°W / 38.439583; -82.52944
Area	0.8 acres (0.32 ha)
Built	1849 (1849)
NRHP Reference #	78002096
Added to NRHP	February 7, 1978

The Macedonia Baptist Church is a historic former Baptist church building near the community of Burlington at the southern point of the U.S. state of Ohio. Constructed in the middle of the nineteenth century, it held a significant place in the culture of the local black population, and it has been named a historic site.

Situated at Ohio's southernmost point, the Burlington vicinity saw large numbers of runaway slaves and free Negroes in the decades before the Civil War. Into such a context, a group of Baptists settled and founded a church at some point between 1811 and 1813; after a period of worshipping in their homes, the congregation constructed a small and primitive church building. Late 1849 was the church's watershed moment: Virginia landowner James Twyman freed many of his slaves at his death and provided for them to be given land near Burlington, and thirty-two of them settled near the church on land that they officially owned, beginning at the end of October. Joining with the existing Baptist congregation, they helped build a replacement church building on Macedonia Ridge, from which the congregation took its name of "Macedonia Missionary Baptist Church". With such a large group of black immigrants, the church began to occupy a prominent place for local blacks, both religious and cultural, and as the years passed, numerous groups of members were sent out to found daughter churches; eight such churches, both in Ohio and in present-day West Virginia, remained active into the late twentieth century.

Macedonia Baptist Church is a simple building, constructed without an architectural style. Its plain gable-front plan features three side windows but no openings in the front gable per se; one enters through double doors at the base of a short bell tower, which is itself set into the front gable. Simple weatherboarding covers the walls, which rest on a stone foundation and are topped with a tin roof; the main body of the building has a plain roof with a steep pitch, although the tower's roughly square shape necessitates a pyramidal roof.