One congregation, four buildings, 191 years in Lafayette Township

William Bisset built the first log cabin in Lafayette Township in 1825. The township was formally organized in 1832. It was named after the Marquis de Lafayette, whose 1824-25 return tour of America was still fresh in settlers' minds.¹

Ten years after Bisset's cabin went up, in 1835, a Methodist circuit-riding minister named Rev. John Kellum organized a congregation in Lafayette. They had no building. They met in schoolhouses and in each other's homes.²

Over the next 162 years, the congregation went through three separate buildings by adaptive reuse and then finally built one of their own. They bought and reused a Baptist meeting house. When they outgrew that, they bought and reused a Congregationalist meeting house. Each time, they kept meeting continuously.³

In 1997, a member named Doris Lance donated 15 acres on which to build fresh. She was fulfilling a wish her late husband Harry had left. The current Lafayette United Methodist Church sits on that land.⁴

The congregation is now in its 191st year of continuous meeting. Its building history reads like a chain of custody for religious real estate in a rural Medina County township: from schoolhouse, to a Baptist building, to a Congregationalist building, to fresh construction on land a widow gave in memory of her husband. Same congregation the entire time.⁵

The other 19th-century artifact still standing nearby is the Medina County Home, established in Lafayette Township in February 1855, with the current building put up in 1894. Behind it is a small cemetery holding more than 105 burials of paupers, transients, and unnamed dead from 1860 through 1950. Those graves have no headstones. They are on the west side of Deerview Lane, north of Wedgewood Road.