The Cradle of Methodism Sits in a Small Delaware Chapel

Barratt's Chapel, built in 1780 on land the landowner Philip Barratt donated near Frederica, is the oldest surviving church building in the country constructed by and for Methodists, and it earned the nickname the Cradle of American Methodism for one specific afternoon rather than for its age alone. On November 14, 1784, Thomas Coke arrived from England carrying instructions from John Wesley himself and preached to a large gathered crowd at the chapel. Francis Asbury, already the movement's leading figure in America, met Coke there after the sermon, and the two spent that day planning what would become, weeks later at Baltimore's Christmas Conference, the founding of the Methodist Episcopal Church as an independent American denomination separate from the Church of England. The sacramental ordinances were administered by Methodist clergy at Barratt's Chapel that same November day for the first time anywhere in America, months before the new church formally existed.

Circuit riders trained in that Wesleyan tradition carried Methodism up and down the Delmarva Peninsula in the following decades, building the camp meeting culture that shaped Methodist practice across the Eastern Seaboard, and it remains visible today in a state where Pew's 2023-24 study found Evangelical Protestant and Catholic identification tied at nineteen percent of adults each, recorded as two facts rather than an arbitrary winner.