Organized in 1839, the Philadelphia Sunday School Society built a house of worship on land along Lick Creek donated by the Turner family. While living at Turnwold Plantation, Joel Chandler Harris attended the church with his mentor, Joseph Addison Turner, editor of The Countryman. Near the close of the Civil War, in late November 1864, General William Tecumseh Sherman's 20th US Army Corps passed through the church's neighborhood during the March To The Sea to capture Savannah for President Lincoln. Confederate soldiers on picket duty near the church posted a notice asking Union soldiers not to deface the building or destroy anything within it, and the message spared the church from damage. After the war, as the community and congregation grew and endured the hardships of Reconstruction through the end of 1871 before more prosperous times returned, the members decided to move the building nearer the center of the community. On October 15, 1884, Mrs. Frances Rhoda Hines Turner Hubert deeded the land where the present church stands, and timbers from the original building were used in constructing the new structure. Early records and tombstones in the large cemetery preserve the names of many founding families, including the Alexanders, Batchelors, Beals, Colliers, Credelles, Dances, Dennises, Denhams, Gatewoods, Holts, Littles, Maddoxes, Montgomerys, Reddicks, Rogerses, Rossers, Slaughters, Spiveys, Turners, and Wheelers, whose descendants continue the founders' work.