Bethel A.M.E. Church

Bethel was the only downtown church still standing after the fire of May 25, 1904, and it kept its Romanesque Revival tower. The steeple wears sheet-metal panels stamped to look like shingles. Its pulpit also carries a music story: Gatemouth Moore, the blues shouter who became an AME minister and then a bishop, was assigned to Yazoo City in 1974 and pastored here and at Lintonia A.M.E. He had walked off a Chicago stage in 1948 and never fully returned, though he still sang the blues now and then.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Triangle Cultural Center — 0.3 mi
  A 1904 school on Main Street in Yazoo City that survived the great fire of that May and now holds the county's historical museum, in a town rebuilt in brick on the same lots.
• Blue Front Cafe — 14 mi
  A cinder-block juke joint in Bentonia, opened in 1948 by Carey and Mary Holmes, home of the Bentonia school of blues and a stop on the Mississippi Blues Trail.
• Delta National Forest — 22 mi
  The only bottomland hardwood forest in the national forest system, some 60,000 acres of oak, ash and cypress in Sharkey County, run with the state as Sunflower Wildlife Management Area.

More markers nearby

• The Oakes House — steps away
• Yazoo County Courthouse — steps away
• Bank of Yazoo City — steps away
• B.S. Ricks Memorial Library — 0.3 mi