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- [S4] Knoxville News-Sentinel (Tennessee), 30 Oct 2007.
Ottis Dean Estella Marie Coleman Holley obituary
- [S84] E-Mail, Tracy Williams [tmwilliams@earthlink.net], 30 Nov 2010.
- [S106] The Mountain Press, 6 Feb 2014.
Effort underway to save New Salem Baptist Church
JAKE OLD
New Salem Baptist Church
Curt Habraken
The property around New Salem Baptist Church is flooded Monday.
SEVIERVILLE —
New Salem Baptist Church, the oldest brick building still standing in the city of Sevierville and a significant historic landmark in Sevier County's African-American community, needs renovation to be preserved after years of chronic flooding has left the building badly damaged. The New Salem Renovation Task Force is a group that was formed in order to try to gather funds and community support.
"I absolutely believe it will be saved," said task force member Alverrene Bridgeforth of the church building. "If I didn't think that, I wouldn't be involved in it. We have an awesome task force that works with me to reach out to those in the community, and we have a lot of people in the community that want to help."
Last week, the task force sent a proposal for a Historic Preservation Grant from the Tennessee Historical Commission. The proposal was successfully submitted and received. It is not currently known how much money a grant could yield. The building is listed on the National Registry of Historic Places and Tennessee's Endangered List of Historic Sites.
"The beauty is, we can apply every year," Bridgeforth said. "If you keep throwing things at the wall, something's going to stick. The support we've gotten, how hard we've been working, I hope that they'll give us something so that we can do something kind of big.
"If we don't do something really soon, no matter what the support, we're going to lose this church, and we absolutely don't want that," she said.
Bridgeforth said the church's renovation is a passion for her because of what the structure means to the community.
"Architecturally, it's one of the most beautiful buildings in the area," she said. "But after years of neglect, it's gotten to the point to where we've got to do major renovations. It's a bad idea to just let it go. It's so important to the community, so many people, black and white and other cultures, they're familiar with this building, they've been around this building, listened to singing coming from the building. It's important that we save history."
Sevier County Historian Carroll McMahan said the building's importance can't be overstated.
"It has so many connections to the history of the African-American community," he said.
Chronic flooding has damaged the building over the years, resulting in black mold inside the building.
"There has always been a problem with flooding there, because it's right at the bend of the creek," Sevier County Historian McMahan said. "That's the big issue. All of the rules and regulations that we have now were not in place back then."
A major fund-raiser will be held later this year. Donations can be made to the New Salem Renovation Task Force at P.O. Box 53134, Knoxville, TN 37950.
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