Zion Lutheran Church Pre-1792 in South Carolina

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Get directions Corley Mill Road
null, South Carolina 29072 United States

Coordinates: 34.03126, -81.16128
Cemetery ID:

Members have Contributed

About these numbers These percentages indicate the number of Find a Grave memorials that have a grave photo or GPS coordinates. We don't know the total number of burials in a cemetery, so we cannot calculate a percentage of those with memorials, photos or GPS coordinates.

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An easily visible monument to this original is ten feet from the road edge on the east side of Corley Mill Road just north of the most-northward entrance to River Bluff High School (which opened in August 2013). Of the listed "interments", one is of pioneer immigrant, Jacob Drafts, who is thought to have been one of the founding members of this church. I believe that this first monument is on the original church site & would be between Corley's Mill (originally Dreher Mill) and Fort Dreher (which included the immigrant, Gottfried [Godfrey] Drehr or Dreher).

Before the early 1800s, it was more common for the deceased to be buried in a family cemetery on the home place. Examples: (1) the Kleckley family. Or (2), as with Jacob Drafts, there may be a known marker as to his death but uncertainty if the body is actually under the more modern marker.

Exactly across Corley Mill Road to the west is the site of Corley Grist Mill. Eastward of the church marker is the residual of old sawdust mounds from the old sawmill. And just to the east of those mounds is the east-facing bluff on which stood colonial "Fort Dreher" which began as a stockade around the home of Godfrey Dreher and maybe the Zion Church. I think the immigrant and his wife are likely buried near the home, essentially at this first Zion Church. A hundred or so yards east of this bluff, eastward of the power-lines open area, is the second site of Zion Lutheran Church (1792-1922). Some depressions in the general area of that cemetery attest to the 1970s-80s transfer of some graves to the modern, present-day ZLC cemetery back up Corley Mill Road toward highway #378.