Mt. Zion CME Church

Mt. Zion stands at the corner of North Greenwood and East College streets in Union City, and the National Register nomination calls it the town's oldest remaining example of African American craftsmanship from the late Victorian era. The congregation dates to about 1870, soon after Black members of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South announced at a Memphis conference that they were forming the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church, now the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. In 1956 the denomination changed its name, and the church changed with it.

By the 1890s the congregation had grown enough to replace its frame church. Members built the brick sanctuary themselves under the Reverend W. E. Palmer and dedicated it in 1896, the largest brick building yet put up for Black worship in Union City. It is a simple gabled basilica with a bell tower, plain outside, and inside it keeps a hipped ceiling of narrow wooden planks and pews with Gothic-arched panel ends. The nomination says that craftsmanship spoke to the congregation's pride one generation after emancipation.

Church and community worked together. In 1917 the congregation backed a brick school for Black children, Miles School, across the street, and the two buildings served as a center for families in the segregated city. The nomination notes that by the mid-1920s the C.M.E. church statewide was in the campaign against lynching, which was still happening in Obion County. The congregation disbanded in 2005 and restarted in 2007. Look from the street and be considerate of services.