New Hope Methodist Church is the oldest Methodist church still in existence in Washington County. Although its early written records are lost, oral history holds that its original structure was built in the late 1700s as a one-room building with a single hand-hewn beam spanning its length and columns supporting the ceiling and roof. Bishop Francis Asbury held a quarterly meeting there in 1801. In 1922 the building was lifted and rolled on logs 138 feet to its current location to enlarge the cemetery, and despite several enlargements and renovations, the original hand-hewn beam remains intact and visible, while original doors are now used for the front entrance and Sunday School rooms. In November 1864 Federal forces brought war to New Hope after the 15th and 17th Corps crossed the Oconee River at Ball's Ferry on Saturday, November 26th. By November 28th, the 17th Corps under Major General Francis P. Blair, Jr., had marched northeast and was joined by Major General William T. Sherman and his staff at Widow Peacock's home near the current intersection of Old Savannah Road and Georgia Highway 15. Their destination that day was the nearest parallel road to the railroad, on the south side, south of Williamson's swamp creek. The column of more than 11,000 infantrymen turned east-southeast on Heards Bridge Road, where Sherman and his staff stopped for their noon meal at the J. C. Moye home, and by evening they arrived and camped around New Hope Methodist Church. Blair and several other officers reportedly camped inside the church and tethered their horses to its columns. To keep warm, they burned hymn books, church records, and some of the building's wood siding in the stove in the middle of the church, while Sherman camped outside, where Major Henry Hitchcock recorded a camp by the roadside beside an open space with pine woods behind and a neat frame church on the right. On Tuesday, November 29th, Sherman, Blair, and the troops of the 17th Corps continued their march generally southeast past Tarver's Mill and just south of Bartow along the Savannah road.