First African American Church

Greater Warner Tabernacle is described as Knoxville's oldest surviving Black congregation, begun in 1845 on Fuller Street on land given by a German. Its first actual building did not go up until the late nineteenth century and was wrecked by storms in 1908; a second church was finished in 1910. The congregation moved to Speedway Circle in 1967, became Greater Warner Tabernacle in 1969, and in 1987 bought the former McCalla Avenue Baptist Church, now on Martin Luther King Jr. Avenue. Local tradition counts it a stop on the Underground Railroad, a claim without surviving documentation.

What the plaque says

First African American Church On this site stood Warner Tabernacle African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, the first African American Church in Knoxville, Tennessee, and the site of the first school for African Americans in east Knoxville. Founded in 1845, it was reported to be a site on the Underground Railroad to freedom. The site of the church moved a number of times. In 1987 the congregation moved to a church building at 3800 Martin Luther King, Jr. Avenue.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Beck Cultural Exchange Center — 0.3 mi
  Knoxville's Black history museum and archive, opened in 1975 in the 1912 Dandridge Avenue house the community bought for $22,500.
• Blount Mansion — 1.6 mi
  The 1792 frame house of William Blount, governor of the Southwest Territory, Knoxville's only National Historic Landmark, where the people he enslaved are named.
• Green McAdoo Cultural Center — 16 mi
  The 1935 school in Clinton that sent twelve Black students down Foley Hill to desegregate Clinton High School in August 1956, now a museum with bronze statues of the Clinton 12.
• Museum of Appalachia — 17 mi
  John Rice Irwin's 65-acre collection of moved log cabins and mountain objects north of Knoxville, opened in 1969, with a cabin believed to be Mark Twain's father's.

More markers nearby

• Odd Fellows Cemetery — 0.3 mi
• Confederate Cemetery — 0.5 mi
• Colored (Negro) Department: Tennessee School for the Deaf (TSD) — 0.5 mi
• William Francis Yardley — 0.8 mi