Mary's Chapel — the 1877 brick church a widow's gift built

The York Methodist congregation goes back to the early 1840s. It started in an old log schoolhouse near York Center. A frame meetinghouse went up in 1844.¹

By 1877, the frame building was 33 years old and undersized. The congregation decided to build in brick. The total cost was $5,000. A local member named Mary Ford put up $3,000 of it. That's 60 percent of the whole project from a single donor.²

The general contractor and architect was a local carpenter named Thomas Rogers. He built it in Romanesque Revival brick, four bays deep on each side and three across the front, with a projecting tower topped by a wheel window and a spire.³

When the congregation moved in, they called the building Mary's Chapel. The name stuck for the next 150 years.

It went on the National Register of Historic Places on February 17, 1978, listed for architecture and religion. Reference number 78002133. It stands today at the intersection of State Route 18 and Columbia Road in Mallet Creek, still hosting an active congregation in the East Ohio Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church.⁴

Mary Ford's biography, beyond the $3,000 gift, is not well documented in accessible online sources. The York Township site and the church itself would have the local record. What survives publicly is her chapel, its bricks, and its name.⁵