Burns "Belfry" Church

The land came through Harrison Stearns, a freedman who had served William Stearns. William's widow deeded it to him in 1867, he sat as one of three freedmen on Oxford's board of aldermen in 1870-71, and he gave part of the lot to the church's Methodist trustees. In 1910 the wooden building came down and a brick church with two corner towers rose for about $3,000. W. R. Boles was the main financier, and many members mortgaged their homes for the loan. The novelist John Grisham later used the building as an office before donating it for restoration.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Oxford Square — 0.2 mi
  The courthouse square laid out in 1837 on land bought from a Chickasaw woman, rebuilt after the 1864 burning and home to Square Books and a memorial to Lafayette County's lynching victims.
• Rowan Oak — 0.5 mi
  William Faulkner's Greek Revival house in Oxford, bought in 1930 and kept by the University of Mississippi, with the outline of A Fable still written on his study wall.
• The Lyceum and the Circle, University of Mississippi — 0.8 mi
  The 1848 Greek Revival building at the center of the Ole Miss campus, where federal marshals held off a mob on 30 September 1962 and James Meredith registered the next morning.
• Sardis Lake and Dam — 16 mi
  A flood-control lake on the Little Tallahatchie, built from 1930s labor and a dredge named Pontotoc, with a dam that for years was the largest earth-filled dam in the world.

More markers nearby

• Freedmen Town — steps away
• Theora Hamblett House — steps away
• St. Peter's (1851), Episcopal — steps away
• Delta Gamma Fraternity — steps away