Adams Grove Presbyterian Church

Adams Grove Presbyterian Church is a historic Greek Revival-style church building in rural Dallas County, Alabama located near the community of Sardis. The church was designed in similar form and style to the Pleasant Hill Presbyterian Church which was constructed just a year earlier in the small community of Pleasant Hill. It is historically significant as being one of the least altered of the seven antebellum Greek Revival-style rural churches surviving in Dallas County. It retains all of its original architectural elements including a paneled pulpit dais and a slave gallery. One should note the four separate entryways which required men, women, and slaves to enter the church separately with slaves using the side entrances leading up into the balcony.

The history of the land and its use for religious purposes dates back to November 13, 1837, when John Sorrell transferred the title of the land to Thomas Watt and John Smith, deacons of the Shiloh Baptist Church. This transaction came with the stipulation that the land would revert back to Sorell or his heirs if it ever ceased use as a church site. When the Shiloh Baptist Church relocated to its current location in Sardis, the land reverted back to Sorell’s daughter and son-in-law, Rebecca Sorell Adams and Henry Adams, in 1853. On October 11, 1853, Henry Adams sold two-and-a-half acres of the former Shiloh Baptist Church site, including a graveyard and spring, to William S. Smith and Phillip Millrous for the purpose of erecting a Presbyterian church. Adams Grove Church was constructed shortly after this transaction.

The surrounding cemetery includes more than 50 graves dating as far back as 1843 to the most recent in 1955. The last service held here occurred in 1974. It was placed on the National Register of Historic Places on June 5, 1986. The building is no longer used by a church congregation and is now privately owned having been preserved to the best of the owner’s ability having added a new roof in the past decade.