Muhlenberg County Kentucky
Church Records
Old Hebron Church
A Church Lies Dying
There no longer is the slightest use for Old Hebron - not since its last tenants quit it as a dwelling house.
By Bobby Anderson, Central City Weekly Newspaper Staff Writer
Old Hebron Church is dying.
The 199-year-old structure is suffering from age, from disuse and neglect. Soon, perhaps, only a pile of tumbled-in, weather-beaten logs and boards will mark the place it stood so long, about five miles off U.S. 431 in southeastern Muhlenberg County. The logs are what it was constructed of originally. The clapboards were an after-thought.
Nobody has a use for the old building any longer - not since its last tenants deserted it, no longer wanting the place for a dwelling house.
Long before the tenants moved in, the last of its congregation had moved away. Many years ago, the congregation founded a successor, New Hebron Missionary Baptist Church, only a mile away.
The old church is at the site of one of the earliest settlements in Muhlenberg County. The area was settled around 1800 by a Revolutionary soldier, John Hunt, who came from North Carolina. With him came the members of his family, as well as the Wood family.
The early Hunts are buried in the graveyard of the dying church. Some of the graves are marked only by sandstones, particularly those of the earliest settlers.
Old Hebron was built about 1834 as a worshiping place for different denominations. Each would meet there at a particular date.
Old Hebron became an official member of the Baptist Church family in 1840, serving only members of that denomination. These members had broken away froom Hazel Creek Church, established in 1798 and believed to be the oldest Baptist Church west of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad in Kentucky. Hazel Creek Church is at Belton, about eight miles northwest of Old Hebron.
No Old Hebron Church records have been kept. The only thing officially known of its birth is in a deed book at Greenville. A deed calls for the transfer of 172 acres from Daniel and Elizabeth Hunt to Gasham Hunt. The deed excluded one acre for use as a meeting house and burying ground. And in William J. Johnson's “History of Hazel Creek Church” is the statement that “in 1840, 13 members from this church formed New (now Old) Hebron Church.”
The 13 members were not listed, but from the rolls of Hazel Creek Church it is easy to pick several names of persons prominently associated with the Hebron or Hunt community around 1840. A few were Elizabeth Wood, Jesse and Charity Davis, John and Elizabeth Hunt, Mary Hunt, plus the Welborns, Clarks, Coxes, and Sumners. John, one of the Coxes, was a preacher. Some of them probably were among the 13.
The graves that can be identified in Old Hebron Cemetery belong to such old families as the Hunts, Harpers, Goodmans, McPhersons, Knights, Sumners, Steels, Penrods, Lathams, Halls, Carrols, Andersons, McCoys, Simpsons, and Porters. There are about 125 graves in all.
For the past few decades the cemetery has undergone cleanups after weeds have almost taken over. But the cleanups lately have been further and further apart. Only one or two families now support the upkeep. At present, the cemetery is in its growing-up stage. There are times when the cemetery, like the church, seems forgotten, as if it, too, seeks to go back into nothingness.
Source: Anderson, Bobby. “A Church Lies Dying.” Courier-Journal Magazine [Louisville, KY], 29 Nov 1953, p. 67
Updated April 26, 2020