On June 4, 1853, nine people signed a petition asking Reverend W.W. Brier to organize the Alameda Presbyterian Church, the first organized Protestant church known to have existed in the East Bay. In 1855, the congregation decided to build a church on this site after George and Mary Jane Lloyd donated a 2 1⁄2-acre lot, and the trustees voted to erect a brick building 24 feet wide and 44 feet long. The church was completed and dedicated in 1856, damaged heavily in the 1868 earthquake, repaired with white siding as the "Old White Church," and remained in Mission Valley until an arson fire destroyed it in 1994. In 1873, the congregation took the name Centerville Presbyterian Church as the village of Centerville prompted the change. The church established the county's first church cemetery, elected the first women elders in 1936, welcomed Rev. Roe Lewis of Pima, Arizona, as the first Native American pastor in 1935, organized its first choir in 1949, and in 1955 bought four acres on Central Avenue and built a new church before the Glenmoor neighborhood was developed. The congregation has continued as a central part of Fremont community life and has served hungry and homeless people as host to the Centerville Free Dining Room. The cemetery was laid out in 1858, and its official record preserves the plot plan, the names of the men who bought plots, and the death and burial dates of 420 people buried there. The last burial took place in 1920; one burial was recorded in 1860, 29 in 1868, and only one or two per year after 1894. Most people were buried in family plots, while Chinese people and a few others were buried in a public plot, and unidentified dead were entered as "a Stranger, a Strange man, a Stranger from Patterson, and a Stranger found dead in the hills." The burial records reveal the hardships of pioneer days, with diphtheria causing the most deaths, followed by consumption, or tuberculosis, and pneumonia, alongside scarlet fever, whooping cough, typhoid fever, cholera, hemorrhage, convulsions, lockjaw, tonsillitis, childbirth, exhaustion, afflictions of the brain, burns, poisons, drowning, and horse, wagon, train, and later automobile accidents, including the death of a 14-year-old boy run over in 1911.