Following the Civil War and emancipation, newly freed African Americans who had worshiped in Bethel Church in McKinley while enslaved established their own Bethel Church in a wooden house at the rear of the current church site. In the mid-1880s, this black Bethel Church became Bethel Hill Missionary Baptist Church. Elizabeth Borden deeded five acres of land to the church in 1894, and Rev. J.A. Lawson led the effort to erect a new building that same year. The structure was bricked during the pastorate of I.C. Acoff in 1936. Until the mid 1950s, McKinley School for African American elementary grade students was attached to the church. Original members of the church are buried in the church yard cemetery.