Sallie A. Crenshaw

Crenshaw's pulpit came by stages. Born in LaGrange, Georgia, she began as lay pastor of the East Chattanooga and Tyner churches in 1931, became a deacon in 1932 and an elder in 1936, and with Laura J. Lange was one of the first two women ordained as local elders in the Central Jurisdiction, the Methodist Church's segregated body for Black members. In 1958 she and Nora E. Young were received into full connection with their annual conference. She served churches in Hamilton County and Virginia and retired in 1971.

What the plaque says

Sallie A. Crenshaw 1900-1986 Ordained in 1936, Sallie Crenshaw was the first black female minister in the East Tennessee Methodist Conference. Returning to Chattanooga after working as a missionary among Negro miners in West Virginia, she was appalled by the number of black children left alone without day care. In 1947, she established the St. Elmo Mission, which was renamed in her honor in 1983. In 1986, the Bethlehem Center was renamed the Sallie Crenshaw Bethlehem Center.

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Point Park on Lookout Mountain — 1.7 mi
  The Tennessee end of Lookout Mountain, where a ten-acre Park Service memorial overlooks Moccasin Bend and the November 1863 fight called the Battle Above the Clouds.
• Bessie Smith Cultural Center — 2.7 mi
  Chattanooga's African American museum and performance hall on the old Ninth Street, named for the Empress of the Blues, who started out singing for change on that same street.
• Ross's Landing — 3.4 mi
  The Tennessee River landing where Chattanooga began and where Muscogee (Creek) and Cherokee people were put on boats and ferried out in 1837 and 1838.
• Tennessee Aquarium — 3.4 mi
  A river-themed aquarium that opened on May 1, 1992, on the Chattanooga bank where John Ross kept a trading post, tracing a raindrop from the Appalachians to the Gulf.

More markers nearby

• Randolph Miller — 0.6 mi
• The University of the South — 1.9 mi
• Bessie Smith — 2.6 mi
• Martin Hotel — 2.7 mi