In 1893, two men walked into the German Pavilion at the World’s Fair in Chicago and bought 68 stained glass windows.
G.W. Whitsett was a dentist, and Charles H. Ireland was an executive at Greensboro’s Odell Hardware Company. Both sat on the building committee of West Market Street Methodist, where the congregation had outgrown its second sanctuary in the city and decided the third one should be a bit more aesthetically pleasing. The two men negotiated the purchase, and church members put up the money to make it happen. The windows were so distracting that one pastor later complained that his congregation looked at them rather than at him.
Eighteen years later, in 1911, a traveler passing through Greensboro sent a note to their friend, Mamie Sharpe, on a postcard adorned with the image of West Market Methodist and its glorious stained-glass windows. “We arrived about 4 o’clock,” reads the back. “Think this [is] a pretty place. Expect to have a fine time.”
In 1893, Greensboro was in the grip of the year’s financial depression. The construction of the church fed a much weakened local economy. The building committee—a roster the National Register nomination compares to a “Who’s Who” of the city—acted as its own general contractor. It hired local workers, ordered brick from the Kirkpatrick Brick Yard on North Greene Street, millwork from Bain Building Company, and granite from Mt. Airy.
The architect, S.W. Foulk, wasn’t local, but building churches was his niche. So he built a classic Richardsonian Romanesque church, including an 85-foot bell tower, corner turrets, and a recessed porch under three granite arches. Inside, the pews curved in a semicircle, the pulpit was only slightly raised, and sliding partitions were installed to wall off Sunday school rooms or be pulled back to create space to seat 2,000 people. Delays dragged completion out to 1898, and the final bill was $52,000— about $22,000 over the estimate. The sanctuary opened for its first public service on April 13, 1898, and was dedicated in 1901, once the debt was finally settled.
“It looks like a castle and makes you think you are guarding something very important inside,” church historian Gayle Fripp told the News & Record in 2005.
The original sanctuary was built in 1831—inside a two-story brick church on South Elm Street—a year after traveling preacher Peter Doub organized the city’s Methodists. It was the first church of any denomination built within the town’s original limits. Its 64 charter members included 18 Black Methodists. Doub’s congregation started a girls’ school in 1832 that grew into Greensboro Female College, now Greensboro College. It was the first women’s college in North Carolina. In 1851, the congregation moved to West Market Street and named itself after the road on which it sat.
Like many Southern churches, West Market was also a political hub. Its first civic test came from Methodists themselves. The denomination began splintering in 1828, when Methodist Protestants left the Methodist Episcopal Church because congregants felt bishops gave them no say in how the church was run. Then, in 1844, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South—the denomination of which West Market was part—broke off because the broader church opposed enslavement. In October 1939, when the three branches proposed reuniting, North Carolina’s Methodists gathered at West Market to vote on it.
Even though the Methodist factions reunited, West Market’s congregation remained predominantly white.
When the question of desegregation came up in the late 1950s and early 1960s, West Market found itself, in the words of longtime member Ike English, “sort of the center of the whole thing. It was the most liberal element in town.” English was the church’s board chairman when its senior pastor, Charles Bowles, arrived in 1955 and began preaching regularly on race.
After the Woolworth’s sit-ins in 1960, the church’s social concerns committee wrote to downtown restaurants urging them to serve Black customers, a letter Bowles signed and the local media covered. The church sent a bus to UNCG so Black students could attend services. Bowles received so much hate mail that the FBI tracked it, and friends eventually advised him to throw certain letters away unopened. When the Ku Klux Klan rallied on the courthouse steps near the church, some blamed the church and its pastor.
Opposition came from the pews, too. Eugene Hood, head of the segregation-defending White Citizens Council, was a congregation member. He twice hauled Associate Minister Harold Hipps before denominational leaders for preaching racial reconciliation and organizing a biracial student meeting. The charges were dismissed both times.
In the same pews as Hood sat Lizzie Baldwin, the church’s only Black member. She joined in the early 1900s and stayed until her death in 1965. The church’s founding Black families left following the Civil War to build congregations of their own, including St. Matthew’s Methodist.
Over the years, downtown Greensboro grew up around West Market Street United Methodist Church. It is flanked downtown by the structures of Greensboro and Guilford County government and is directly across a now bustling Market Street from the Old Guilford County Courthouse. The congregation that built the W. Market Street sanctuary for 2,000 now has just over 1,600 members. The church itself has been tended to and upgraded. A $9.5 million renovation at the turn of the millennium added a smaller, triple-arched entrance on Commerce Place, a columbarium beneath the sanctuary, and the Early Childhood Center sponsored by the church was given a new home across West Friendly.
The church’s legacy of welcoming all continues today, as well. Senior pastor Rev. Otto D. Harris III is the church’s first Black senior pastor who came to West Market after serving as interim director of his conference’s Comprehensive Plan of Equity. He was brought on to advance the church’s justice and equity work. The church’s modern tagline: “All are Beloved.”
That mission continues through partnerships with local colleges. The church helps fund and organize food drives for UNC Greensboro’s Spartan Open Pantry and NC A&T’s Aggie Source Food Pantry, and does the same for Greensboro College—with the addition of partnering to pack meals for food-insecure students.
“We’re hoping this is bigger than the church,” Harris said. “This is a community effort… to share dignity, share food, share experiences and share life together.”
That mission connects the church’s past and present, Harris said.
“We’re doing our very best to extend love and grace to everyone,” he said. “I’m grateful for the community that has loved West Market Street for many years.”
The church’s windows are still there, older than nearly everything downtown that stands out in front of them.
