Tabernacle Cemetery, sometimes called Old Tabernacle Cemetery, is located on Tabernacle Cemetery Road, just east of S.C. Highway 254 (Cokesbury Road), approximately 1 mile northwest of Greenwood and approximately 2 miles southeast of Cokesbury, in Greenwood County, S.C.
This early-nineteenth-to-early-twentieth century cemetery maintains a high degree of integrity of location, setting, design, materials and association. The cemetery is located on a 3.5 acre parcel. Approximately 1.03 of those acres is enclosed by a fence made from upright granite stones with wrought iron fencing between them.
More recent graves are in evidence directly to the south and older graves are scattered among the trees in the open wooded area on the eastern edge of the Tabernacle plat. The wooded eastern area with scattered gravestones outside the fence is bordered by a ravine that leads to Coronaca Creek.
The cemetery contains approximately 132 marked graves, with headstones, footstones, and a few plot enclosures of granite, marble, fieldstone, or soapstone. Most gravestones are marble or granite tablets although obelisks and brick tombs are also present. The earliest marked graves are from the early nineteenth century, and most graves date from ca. 1812 to ca. 1950. The stones are arranged in most part by family units within the cemetery boundaries. They do show environmental wear and some minor vandalism but have been under of the upkeep of the Olde Abbeville Camp # 39 of the Sons of Confederate Veterans. The small scattering of graves located on the eastern edge of the plat outside of the fenced boundary among the trees is difficult to reach. The more modern graves directly south of the fenced boundary are located in a small clearing, clearly separate from the older markers. The 3.5 acres now held by the Greenwood County Historical Society covers all of the graves within and around the fenced area. The cemetery is entered through an opening created by granite posts. It contains little formal landscaping or plantings.
Tabernacle Cemetery, established ca. 1812, is significant as an early cemetery in the Tabernacle community of what was then Abbeville District, and for its association with many prominent citizens of Abbeville and Edgefield Districts and later Greenwood County as well, from the early nineteenth through the twentieth centuries. It is also an excellent intact example of an early-nineteenth through mid-twentieth century cemetery reflecting typical burial customs and gravestone of the period.
Additional Information
Tabernacle Cemetery is the only extant historic resources associated with the early Tabernacle community, established by Methodists in the old Abbeville District in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, including such institutions as the Tabernacle Meeting House (later Tabernacle Methodist Church), informally organized by 1788 but formally established and located on this site by 1812, and active here until 1873, and the Tabernacle Academy, founded and built here in 1820-21 and operating here until 1825.
George Connor (1759-1827) and his wife Anna Woolfolk Connor (1762-1825) owned the land that became the center of the Tabernacle community. The Connors came to South Carolina from Virginia and settled here shortly after the American Revolution. Most of the land on which the communities of Tabernacle, Cokesbury, and Mt. Ariel were later established was owned by George Connor.
Several Methodist families in the vicinity, who moved to this area from the town of Cambridge, or Old Ninety Six—approximately ten miles east—about the same time as the Connors, soon established a “Methodist society” by about 1788 or shortly thereafter and held occasional services.
Rev. James Elizabeth Glenn (1786-1851), a Methodist minister and native of Virginia like George Connor, came to this area by 1812 and held regular services here, naming the society “Tabernacle.” Glenn oversaw the construction of the second permanent meeting house, a frame building constructed by slave labor ca. 1820-21 which replaced the first log meeting house; it was described in 1860 as “a frame house of ordinary dimensions, neither ceiled nor plastered.”
Glenn also encouraged the establishment and supervised the construction of the Tabernacle Academy, a successor school to Bishop Francis Asbury’s Bethel (or Mount Bethel) Academy, founded in 1793 in Newberry District. Glenn and the school trustees—including George Connor—hired Stephen Olin (1797-1851), a native of Vermont and graduate of Middlebury College there, to be the first headmaster of the new Tabernacle Academy.
The academy was described by Olin, Glenn, and its trustees, in a 1822 appeal asking the South Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church to be its patron, as “in operation during the last year and . . . still in successful progress. The[y] have erected a commodious building, in a healthy and pleasant situation, remote from scenes of intemperance and vice. The neighbourhood is believed to be inferior to none in the state.” They closed by asking the Methodist establishment to support Tabernacle Academy’s “interests of piety and learning.” The South Carolina Conference soon took financial and administrative responsibility for the school, working with Olin, Glenn, and the trustees to ensure that it offered “the best advantages for the education of our children and the children of our people.” One historian of early nineteenth century Methodist schools in America later claimed, Tabernacle Academy and its principal became known far and near. Students came from all parts of the South, eager to be pupils of so eminent and widely known a preceptor.
Olin soon began preaching as well as teaching, and earned his license as a Methodist minister in 1822. He left Tabernacle Academy in 1824 to become an itinerant preacher, but soon returned to education as his primary focus. His later career included service as a professor at the University of Georgia in Athens, as president of Randolph-Macon College in Lynchburg, Virginia, and finally as president of Wesleyan University in Connecticut, where he remained from 1831 until his death in 1851.
After Olin’s departure as principal of the Tabernacle Academy its trustees and other prominent citizens of the Tabernacle community began to consider the possibility of establishing a new town nearby, a “village” with regular lots laid out and sold to residents. They decided to call this new community—which they located two miles northwest—Mount Ariel. The town was planned in 1824-25, and the first lots occupied and first post office opened in 1825. In 1834 Mount Ariel was renamed Cokesbury in honor of Reverends Thomas Coke and Francis Asbury, the first two Methodist bishops in the United States.
The trustees of the Tabernacle Academy voted to relocate the school to Mount Ariel as well, later establishing separate male and female academies at Cokesbury. The old Tabernacle Academy on this site was occasionally used as a church until a new one was built in Cokesbury in 1837.
Old Cokesbury, and Masonic Female College and Conference School, a rural historic district including the Cokesbury and Masonic Female College, later the Cokesbury Conference School (built 1854) as well as several houses built from 1840 to 1850, was listed in the National Register of Historic Places on August 25, 1970.
Tabernacle Methodist Church was an active Methodist congregation in the Cokesbury Circuit until about 1873; the church building was later dismantled, moved to Greenwood, and served as a parsonage for ministers in the Cokesbury Circuit.
The Tabernacle Cemetery continued to serve the citizens of the Mount Ariel and Cokesbury communities well into the twentieth century. In 1988, the trustees of Cokesbury United Methodist Church—the successor congregation to Tabernacle Methodist Church—transferred the 3.5-acre parcel to the South Carolina Conference of the United Methodist Church, which in turn transferred it to the Greenwood County Historical Society.
Among the prominent persons buried in Tabernacle Cemetery are:
Rev. Henry Bass (1786-1860), Methodist minister; a native of Connecticut, who came to South Carolina and joined the South Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1812;
George Connor (1759-1827), a native of Caroline County, Virginia who came to this area after the American Revolution; planter and trustee of the Tabernacle Academy;
Lt. George Whitfield Connor (1832-1894), merchant and Confederate lieutenant in Company F, 2nd South Carolina Infantry, serving in the Army of Northern Virginia; Corp., Company F, 1861-62; Sgt., 1862-63; 2nd Lt., 1863-65; wounded and captured at Chickamauga, Georgia, 19 or 20 September 1863, and later paroled; slightly wounded at Cold Harbor, Virginia, 1 June 1864; captured at Cedar Creek, Virginia, 19 October 1864; paroled at Fort Delaware, Delaware, June 1865;
Rev. Thomas Cottrell (d. 1834), Episcopal minister and later a Methodist minister; a native of Virginia or Maryland, who was headmaster, along with his wife, of the girls’ school at Mount Ariel;
Rev. Samuel Dunwody (1780-1854), Methodist minister; a native of Pennsylvania, who came to South Carolina and joined the South Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1806; served as a delegate from the South Carolina Conference to the First General Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church; author of A Sermon Upon the Subject of Slavery (1837), an early Biblical defense of the institution of slavery; second minister of Cokesbury Methodist Church, 1838-39; retired to Cokesbury in 1846 and died there in 1854;
Brig. Gen. Nathan George Evans (1824-1868), United States and Confederate army officer, brother-in-law of John Hilary Gary (q.v.) and Martin Witherspoon Gary (q.v.); attended Randolph-Macon College and the United States Military Academy (West Point), Class of 1848; Lt., 2nd Dragoons, then Lt. and Capt., 2nd U.S. Cavalry, 1848-56; resigned commission February 1861; Capt. and Maj., Confederate States Army, 1861; Col., 4th South Carolina Infantry, 1861; Brig. Gen., October 1861-1865, with service in the Confederate Army of the Potomac, the Department of S.C., Ga., and Fla., the Army of Northern Virginia, and the Army of Tennessee; died in Alabama shortly after the war;
Capt. John Hilary Gary (1840-1863), Confederate army officer, brother of Martin Witherspoon Gary (q.v.) and brother-in-law of Nathan George Evans (q.v.); South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina), Class of 1861; Capt., South Carolina College Cadet Company, December 1860-1861; 1st. Lt., then Capt., Company A, 15th Battalion (Lucas’s Battalion) S.C. Artillery, 1861-63; mortally wounded at Battery Wagner, Morris Island, near Charleston, 13 August 1863, and died 17 August 1863; Battery Gary, a Confederate floating artillery battery near Mount Pleasant, was named after him when it was built;
Brig. Gen. Martin Witherspoon Gary (1831-1881), Confederate army officer, lawyer, and state legislator, brother of John Hilary Gary (q.v.) and brother-in-law of Nathan George Evans (q.v.); attended South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina) and Harvard University, Class of 1854; S.C. House of Representatives, 1860-61; Capt., Hampton’s (South Carolina) Legion, 1861; Lt. Col., then Col., Hampton’s Legion (Cavalry), 1862; Brig. Gen., May 1864-April 1865, with service in the Army of Northern Virginia; S.C. Senate, 1876-1880; died in Edgefield;
Benjamin Zachariah Herndon (1822-1886), planter, state legislator and officer in the South Carolina Reserves, son of Stephen Herndon (q.v.); educated at Randolph-Macon College; S.C. House of Representatives, 1854-55; Lt. Col., 1st South Carolina Reserves, 1861-1865;
Stephen Herndon (1773-1848), a native of Virginia and planter, father of Benjamin Zacharian Herndon (q.v.), who came to this area from Newberry District and built a “fine house” at Mount Ariel when it was established in 1825;
Samuel Anderson Hodges (1802-1871), postmaster at Cokesbury 1841-1848; he also served as tax collector and as sheriff of Abbeville District;
Humphrey Klugh (1766-1837), a native of Virginia and veteran of the American Revolution who settled northeast of present-day Greenwood in 1792;
Rev. John Porter (1780-1847), Methodist minister; joined the South Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1805 and preached in the state more than forty years;
Capt. Joshua Milton Townsend (d. 1863), Confederate officer; 1st Lt., then Capt., Company A, 3rd Battalion South Carolina Infantry, 1861-63, with service in the Army of Northern Virginia; captured during the Maryland Campaign, September 1862, later paroled; commanding the 3rd Battalion when he was killed in action at the Battle of Chickamauga, Georgia, 20 September 1863;
Thomas W. Williams (d. 1846), planter and Methodist layman on the Board of Trustees, Cokesbury College.
The Tabernacle Cemetery is eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places under Criterion A for its association with the early settlement, growth, and development of this part of Abbeville District (which became Greenwood County in 1897), as the last extant historic resource associated with the Tabernacle community; and for its association with some of the most prominent citizens of this part of what was then Abbeville District during the first three quarters of the nineteenth century.