74B-10
Mount Nebo African Methodist Episcopal Church & Cemetery 17214 Queen Anne Road, Queen Anne Historic site; built 1925
T
he old Mount Nebo A.M.E. Church was built to replace an earlier church building. In June 1877, one acre from the Plummer family’s Poplar Ridge tract was sold to three black men of the Queen Anne area; these men (Richard Wood, George W. Larkins, and Wilson Turner) were acting as trustees for the African Methodist Episcopal Church and the land was to be “for the use of the African Methodist Church and as a burial ground for colored persons.” The one-acre lot adjoined the recently (1875) completed school for black children of the Queen Anne vicinity. A small log church was completed within a few years, and together with the schoolhouse, became a focal point for the local black community.
The old Mount Nebo African Methodist Episcopal Church is a one-story, front-gabled church building of wood frame construction, typical of the small meetinghouses of the early twentieth century. Centered in the south gable front of the building is a small entry tower with pyramidal roof. Entrance is in its south face through a paneled double door. There is a rear addition that extends the sanctuary to a fourth bay, and turns to form a shallow ell wing. Northwest of the church is a small graveyard bordered by woods. Both school and church fronted on the old road between Upper Marlboro and Queen Anne. A century earlier Queen Anne had been a thriving commercial port town, but by the late 1870s it was a quiet river crossing with a few stores and dwellings, and a significant black and biracial population. One of the most prominent residents of Queen Anne, William Lane Watkins, is closely associated with the Mount Nebo church and school. Watkins was born in 1852, son of an enslaved woman and a white father; he was educated in Massachusetts and received a medical degree from Boston University. He returned to Prince George’s County in the late 1870s and married a daughter of Wilson Turner, one of the trustees of Mount Nebo A.M.E. Church. Watkins practiced medicine in the Queen Anne area and taught school at the Queen Anne school (located next to Mount Nebo Church). He was also active in local politics, serving on the Republican State Central Committee for several years, before his death in 1929.
212 CHURCHES AND CEMETERIES African-American Historic and Cultural Resources