Oakey Streak Methodist Episcopal Church, Church building in Butler County, Alabama, United States
Oakey Streak Methodist Episcopal Church is a Gothic Revival frame church in Butler County, Alabama. Its sanctuary, 32 by 48 feet (9.8 by 14.6 m), has a front-facing gable roof and a box cornice with returns. A pyramidal-roofed bell tower with a double entry door, pedimented overhang and arched transom stands between two Gothic lancet windows, and each side holds four two-over-two sash windows.
The congregation was organized in 1831, and the land where the church now stands was given to it in 1851; a log building went up soon after. The present frame structure replaced it around the 1880s. In 1903 the church was enlarged and a bell tower added. It joined the National Register of Historic Places in 1980.
The church and the adjacent Masonic Lodge, demolished in the 1940s, together formed the social center of the Oakey Streak area, not just a place of worship. The lodge's loss left the church as the surviving witness to that combined religious and civic role in rural Butler County.
The church stands in the Oakey Streak community of rural Butler County, Alabama, not in Greenville. It is a frame building with a pyramidal-roofed bell tower, double entry door under a pedimented overhang, and an arched transom above the doorway. The sanctuary is 32 by 48 feet, with four two-over-two sash windows on each side.
A neighboring Masonic Lodge that stood beside the church was torn down in the 1940s, though both buildings together served as an important social hub for the region. This dual function as both religious and social space was particularly characteristic of rural Alabama communities.
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