Thyatira Presbyterian Church was established shortly after land grants were made in the area in 1747 and before 1750, making it the oldest church of any denomination or institution in the western half of North Carolina with legal documentation proving its age. Burials were here by 1750, and the first meeting house stood in a vacant section of the old cemetery below the traffic circle. The earliest surviving marker is for John Nesbit, 1755. The cemetery also contains unmarked spaces that probably hold burials whose markers were never placed or did not survive, including a collateral ancestor of John Knox, founder of the Presbyterian Church in Scotland, veterans from all wars beginning with the French and Indian War, ancestors of one U.S. President and two Vice Presidents, a Civil War surgeon, a U.S. Congressman, and, by tradition, four pirates. Thyatira's first permanently ordained minister was Dr. Samuel Eusebius McCorkle, a graduate of what became Princeton University, a son of the congregation, a founder of the University of North Carolina, and the only minister among the university's forty original trustees. Thyatira was the only congregation to contribute financially to the university, the first state school in the nation to open in 1794, and McCorkle served Thyatira from 1777 to 1805. The present vernacular Gothic Revival church, the congregation's fourth house of worship, was completed in 1860 and is noted for its elaborate brickwork; it still contains the original gallery where African Americans worshipped, and some of the original pulpit furniture remains in use. The congregation also owns pre-1780 pictures of King George II and Queen Charlotte bearing writing on the back by Revolutionary War General Nathanael Greene, and their Salisbury, North Carolina, owner during the American Revolution is buried in the cemetery. Over the years, Thyatira's wider influence has included more than thirty sons and daughters serving in ministry and missions and the production of two moderators of the General Assembly, the highest elected office in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A.; it also received visits from a U.S. Vice President, an African tribal chief, and several other General Assembly moderators.