At the main crossroads of Barry Farm, a post-Civil War (1861-1865) village settled by formerly enslaved people, churches became central to neighborhood life. Macedonia Baptist Church at 2625 Stanton Road was organized in 1866 by Rev. James William Howard, and ten years later a group led by Rev. Henry Scott left Macedonia to form Bethlehem Baptist Church across Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue. Some early residents walked a mile to the African Methodist Episcopal Allen Chapel, which had served the free black families of Good Hope village since 1850, and they later formed what became Campbell AME Church. During the 1950s, Campbell AME hosted groups working to desegregate schools in the District, and young members Barbara and Adrienne Jennings were plaintiffs in Bolling v. Sharpe, one of the cases folded into Brown v. Board of Education; in 1954 the Supreme Court outlawed school segregation nationwide. African American Episcopalians attended the Chapel of St. Philip the Evangelist, founded in 1887 as a mission of the nearby white Emmanuel Episcopal Church, and its 1937 building on Shannon Place was a gift from undertaker Minnie B. Smoot. Former City Council Chair Arrington Dixon recalled that St. Philip's Father Charles Walden gave him his first political awareness through regional Episcopal Diocese youth meetings. On Elvans Road, civic leader, lecturer, and poet Solomon Brown founded Pioneer Sabbath School, where adults heard uplifting talks by Frederick Douglass, Representative John Mercer Langston, and other members of Congress in weekly meetings at Douglass Hall on the corner of Howard Road. The United House of Prayer for All People came to Anacostia in 1942 and to this crossroads in 1969.
