Robinson Springs United Methodist Church

Robinson Springs is the rural Greek Revival that kept everything — the late-1840s temple-form church on Eli Robinson's land, still holding its altar rail, its pews, its coin-silver Communion service, and the slave gallery on Tuscan columns where the enslaved members of the congregation sat. The congregation started in the log assembly houses in 1828; the church the planters built is one of Alabama's most noted rural churches, and the slave gallery is still in it.

The fluted Doric columns were probably fashioned by enslaved carpenters — the country craftsman who built from the handbook and the enslaved hands that did the work are both in the building. HABS documented it; the congregation still meets in it; the Fourth of July barbecue that started in 1828 ran until the eighties. The church the Methodists built before the war is still doing what it was built to do.

The file keeps Robinson Springs: the 1828 congregation, Eli Robinson's land, the slave gallery on Tuscan columns, and the church that never stopped.

Robinson Springs is the archive's slave-gallery file — the Greek Revival church that kept everything, including the evidence.