Ebenezer Baptist Church was constituted on July 31, 1819, by Isaac Suttle, Lewis C. Davis ("Old Club Axe"), and William Harrod. Its first house of worship was a large log house located one mile south of this site near Bogle's Creek. After fire destroyed that structure, a second building was erected here in the 1830s on the hill where the pastorium now stands. On April 1, 1865, this property became the site of the Battle of Ebenezer Church, a brief but fierce Civil War engagement in which more than 1,500 Confederate cavalrymen under Maj. Gen. Nathan B. Forrest fought a larger Union force led by Maj. Gen. James H. Wilson as it moved toward Selma. Forrest was wounded here, and Union forces captured 300 Confederates and seized three artillery pieces. The Union dead were buried in the church cemetery on the hill. The next day Wilson's forces captured and destroyed the Selma Ordinance and Naval Foundry, one of the Confederacy's last remaining industrial and manufacturing centers. The Civil War-era church burned in 1917, and a new edifice was built around 1919.