Lake Chapel: Once a Church, now a Cemetery

The following information is quoted from A Survey of 22 Cemeteries in the Johnsonville-Hemingway Area of Old Williamsburg District of South Carolina by Elaine Eaddy, circa 1979, with additional updated commentary from Josh Dukes following:

Lake Chapel Baptist Church and Cemetery
as seen on a 1946 map

"Lake Chapel was a small nest of Baptists surrounded by Methodism at Prospect, Ebenezer, and Old Johnsonville. All were a little too far to make traveling easy and comfortable by horse and buggy. The writer [Elaine Eaddy] has not been successful in determining what influences led to the establishment of a Baptist Church at that particular time and place, nor has a precise date been determined. The deed was not recorded; indirect evidence, however, indicates that the church was built about 1890.

Julian Tanner Sr, born in 1880, was a small boyfollowing in his father's footsteps when the beams and sills were being hewn for the building. More than 50 years later, when the building was raised, Tanner found his muddy bare footprint on a beam.  The church was built on the land of Dudley Cox (1847-1923) who married Snow Johnson (1843-1927) daughter of Emely and Nicholas F. Johnson. Emely Johnson's is the earliest grave mark in the cemetery, dated 17 July 1891.

Emely Snow Johnson (1815-1891)
oldest marked grave

A one room school near the church provided the only education available to the children of the neighborhood. Church and school had a happy location near Mineral Spring, famous for its helpful qualities as drinking water. A rustic shed protected the bubbling spring. Among Lake Chapel's earliest ministers was the Reverend John J. Powers (1843-1915), who married Martha Jane Williams of Georgetown County, and Henry H. Prater, a Yankee of German origin who had fought in the Civil War, but later settled in the Vox community...  Only the cemetery remains."

-Elaine Y. Eaddy, circa 1979

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So what happened to the chapel itself? A Charleston News and Courier article from March 20, 1944 notes that Lake Chapel was one of the member churches of the Southeast Baptist Association, which was to meet in Kingstree on April 4 of that year. 

Mary Hanna Baxley (born 1935) remembers playing in the old chapel as a girl. Wade Powers was preacher around this time.  The church had oil lamp lights made from old wagon wheels hanging from the ceiling.  Her brother Thomas Hanna would run to the front and pretend to preach from the pulpit.  

Vonnie Hanna Dukes (1936-2017) recalled that part of the vacant chapel burned when she was a young girl. Someone was burning a pile of leaves or yard waste behind the building and it caught fire. To her best recollection, the chapel was already vacant and had ceased services by the time of the fire.

It appears that the chapel wasn't badly damaged by this blaze if at all, because on November 8, 1952 the Florence Morning News reported that the "Old Lake Chapel Church near Johnsonville will be sold to the highest bidder for cash on Saturday, November 15 at 2 p.m.  The proceeds from the sale will be donated to Connie Maxwell Baptist Orphanage."

- Josh Dukes, 2023