Union Street Methodist Episcopal Church

The Union Street Methodist Episcopal Church was an African-American church founded by Reverend John Baptist Snowden in 1867.

Reverend John Baptist Snowden was born a slave in Westminster in 1801. He began to preach locally at the age of twenty-one and bought his freedom shortly thereafter. He helped found the Washington Conference in 1864, an organization of African American Methodists in Maryland and Washington, D.C. Part of his duties included overseeing the Western Chapel Charge in Carroll County, and he was approached by a delegate from Westminster in 1866 about building a Methodist Episcopal Church in that town. The church on Union Street was built in 1867 on land donated by Amos and Rebecca Bell, with Snowden as one of the five original trustees. After the Civil War, the church sponsored a Freedman’s Bureau school. Classes began by January 1868 and were held in the church until the completion of the schoolhouse in November 1869.