Steele Creek Presbyterian Church
(ca. 1889 and 1763)
The second oldest church building in Mecklenburg County was once the home of the nation’s largest rural Presbyterian church.
7401 and 7407 Steele Creek Road, Charlotte, NC, 28217
Officially organized in 1760, Steele Creek Presbyterian Church was founded two years before the formation of Mecklenburg County. But the Steele Creek community was home to an active Presbyterian congregation as early as 1745. Before the church’s formal organization, locals were served by circuit riders, itinerant preachers each charged with serving several settlements. In 1764, the Presbyterian Synod of New York and Philadelphia reorganized and adjusted the boundaries of the North Carolina churches. The Sugaw Creek church already had a pastor, so calls went out for “settled” pastors for the congregations of Steele Creek, Providence, Hopewell, Centre (now in Iredell County), and Rocky River and Poplar Tent (both now in Cabarrus County). Those seven churches – known as the “Seven Sisters” – were the first churches established in Mecklenburg County by its early Scotch-Irish settlers.
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During much of its first century of existence, the Steele Creek congregation experienced extended periods of either shared pastors or no pastors. Its first “settled” pastor – Reverend Robert Henry, appointed in 1766 – was shared with Providence Presbyterian Church. Following Henry’s death in 1767, Steele Creek was without a pastor until 1778, when Reverend James McRee arrived to stabilize and grow the small congregation. By the early 1800s, Steele Creek was considered a large and important congregation even though it had only 100 White and about twenty Black members. The church struggled through the Civil War as some 204 members enlisted for service and 101 returned to be buried in the church cemetery. But the congregation rebounded rather quickly to become the largest rural Presbyterian congregation in the national Presbyterian Church’s Southern General Assembly for much of the twentieth century. By the 1950s, it was the national General Assembly’s largest rural church. But closure became inevitable as the constant expansion of the neighboring Charlotte Douglass International Airport caused a precipitous drop in church membership. In January 2019, the Steele Creek congregation merged with the congregation of Pleasant Hill Presbyterian Church, leaving its Steele Creek campus for the Pleasant Creek campus some eight miles away.
The remaining Gothic Revival sanctuary – the sixth house of worship built by the Steele Creek congregation – is the second oldest church building in Mecklenburg County. After the 1858 sanctuary burned to the ground in 1888, the extant sanctuary was completed on the site in 1889 using bricks made by the congregation from clay on the grounds. The cemetery features more than 1,700 mostly intact headstones dating from 1763 to the present, including what is believed to be the largest and most diverse collection of headstones crafted by the Bigham Family stonecutters shop. The Bigham shop was the area’s first and most prolific group of stonecutters for nearly fifty years, between the 1760s and the 1810s. According to church tradition, much of the stone wall surrounding the cemetery was constructed using enslaved labor.