Bethlehem Centers of Nashville 100th Anniversary (1894-1994)

The roots lie with Nashville Methodist women, who in 1894 began helping immigrant families and in 1896 founded the Door of Hope Mission. The first settlement house opened in 1901 and became the Wesley Community House, modeled on Hull House. Sallie Hill Sawyer, a Fisk graduate, urged Methodists to serve Black Nashvillians, and the Bethlehem Center building went up in 1914 with an interracial staff by the next year. Camp Dogwood opened in 1929 on 48 acres in Cheatham County, the first Middle Tennessee camp for Black children. The agency took its present name in 1992.

What the plaque says

Bethlehem Centers of Nashville 100th Anniversary (1894-1994) Formerly United Methodist Neighborhood Centers, Bethlehem Centers of Nashville began as settlement houses: Wesley House (1894), Centenary Center (1908), and Bethlehem Center (1911). Bethlehem Center was one of the first locations for African American Boy and Girl Scout troops in Nashville. Its Camp Dogwood was the first camp for African American children in this region of Tennessee. In February 1994, the Tennessee State Museum honored the agency with a 100-piece pictorial exhibit.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Tennessee State Capitol — 0.8 mi
  William Strickland's Greek Revival capitol on Nashville's Capitol Hill, finished in 1859 and built from the bottom up with the labor of enslaved men.
• Civil Rights Room at the Nashville Public Library — 0.8 mi
  A room in the downtown library with a circular lunch counter, a timeline and oral histories of the 1960 Nashville sit-ins, a few blocks from the stores where they began.
• Fisk University and Jubilee Hall — 0.8 mi
  The 1866 school for freed people whose Jubilee Singers paid for Jubilee Hall, a National Historic Landmark, and whose students helped start Nashville's sit-ins.
• National Museum of African American Music — 0.9 mi
  A downtown Nashville museum, opened in 2021, tracing gospel, blues, jazz, rhythm and blues and hip-hop through Black history from 1619 to 2016.

More markers nearby

• First State Penitentiary — steps away
• William Edmondson — steps away
• Grace M. Eaton/Grace M. Eaton Dayhome — 0.2 mi
• John Robert Bradley — 0.5 mi