Ebenezer AME Church Saint Paul Cemetery in Shady Side, Maryland

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Get directions next to 6275 Shady Side Rd.
Shady Side, Maryland 20764 United States

Coordinates: 38.83775, -76.51493
Cemetery ID:

Members have Contributed

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Is located between two houses on Shady Side Rd, directly across the street from the fire department. There is a small dirt road leading back to a small but spread out cemetery with 11 or 12 plots. There could be more but the area is in the woods and very overgrown.

The following information is taken from the Maryland Inventory of Historic Properties:

There were originally three African Methodist Episcopal congregations in southern Anne Arundel County: Ebenezer, Galilee and St. Pauls. Ebenezer was founded in Galesville in 1870 and is the only remaining AME congregation in the area. Galilee was situated on Wayson Rd. and ceased to exist in the early 1900's. St. Paul's founded by the McKail family in Shady Sidem functioned as a congregation from 1878 until 1976. In its last years the congregation had only eight members and they moved to Ebenezer Church. The cemetery at St. Pauls is maintained but the presiding AME Bishop ( Bishop Murph-Washington D.C.) has given permission to the Vestrymen to tear the Chapel down.
St. Paul's A.M.E. Chapel is the oldest AME structure in southern Anne Arundel county. It was built by ex-slaves and freemen less than twenty years after the Civil War. It was a church built by blacks for a black dominated religion. Most black Methodist's belonged and still belong to the Methodist Episcopal or Methodist Protestant Churches ( now both United Methodist) in this region. St. Paul's remains, even in its deteriorated condition, a symbol of the freedman's struggle to build his own institutions and to worship in a religion where he was in equal among peers.