For decades, Hawthorne’s New Hope Methodist Episcopal Church met in a small, steepled building. Built in 1907, it was the first church building the congregation constructed, but the members had met since 1870 in a cabin—founding Hawthorne’s first African American church. 

Pastor Gene Herring said the cabin is long gone, but the wooden church building still stands, just with a different purpose. The building now displays the history of not just its first congregants but all of Hawthorne’s citizenry.  

The city of Hawthorne, through its historical society, took possession of the building in 1998 and moved it to Hawthorne Historical Park. Renovations happened and the building opened in 2002 as the Hawthorne Historical Museum and Cultural Center.  

Herring now heads the Hawthorne Historical Society that manages the museum. The museum still has the original church pews, windows and flooring. 

“We kind of have a fundamental agreement that we’re not going to abandon the original historical value of the building itself,” Herring said. “It’s a museum now, but if you walk in it, you can know that it was at one time a church.” 

Right inside the museum entrance, the church’s original pulpit and Bible from 1907 sit on display, donated when the museum first opened. In a glass case, Herring pulls out a copy of New Hope’s original 1870 deed.  

He said the church outgrew the building, and in the 1960s, a new construction project was underway. But the older, wooden building remained and was used for Sunday school and other programs until disrepair started setting in.  

Herring said Jane Segal spearheaded the work to move and remodel the church building. It was a win for the church and the newly created historical society.  

New Hope, with Herring now as pastor, was in another construction phase roughly 40 years after the previous one. The church didn’t want to tear down the 1907 building, he said, and would probably have moved it to another section of their property.  

But the building needed a lot of restoration to be useful.  

“I knew Miss Segal at the time, and I knew the conversations that they needed a building,” Herring said.  

Herring said he convinced New Hope to hold off on its construction program to get the old building, still somewhat attached to the new church structure, in the hands of the historical society.  

As a part of the United Methodist Church at the time, Herring said it was no small deal to sell a piece of property. It meant going to the governing organization and getting approval, but the greenlight came and the building got the steeple taken off, placed on a trailer and moved about a quarter of a mile to the other side of US 301.  

Segal, who died in 2013, and other volunteers started reviving the old building with new window frames, a refurbished floor and an outside paint job. She traveled to Tallahassee for three years to secure a $50,000 grant to help pay for the project. 

“A lot of hours and a lot of love went into this,” Segal told the Gainesville Sun in a 2002 article about the grand opening. 

Herring said the museum becomes a repository for items that families no longer need, especially after a death. He said the museum works to make room for physical items, but the museum largely gets paper donations.  

He points to a stack of papers dropped off a few weeks earlier and said the job is to sift through the documents to find out the relevance. Then, the museum can figure out how to display the information.  

He said future displays may look like the rotating display along the wall that allows visitors to flip through and view the document along a certain theme. The museum could have a variety of these that rotate in and out, and he said the museum has electronically scanned a number of the paper artifacts.  

He also wants to make more stand-up banners with information on a certain topic or person. The museum already has two of these about the city’s founding and Chester Shell, for whom the elementary school is named. 

Since starting the work, Herring has also seen a lack of preservation in many families, especially in the Black community.  

“That’s one of the struggles that we face in the Black community: that lack of concern with the preservation of those historical assets,” Herring said.  

Families of many prominent Black community leaders, worthy of spots in the museum, have no items to donate. He said it’s also been a problem beyond the museum, with land and houses being sold because descendants don’t keep up with taxes.  

The items he said aren’t just hidden but gone.  

“I doubt, if you could just have free reign and go out and canvas the community, [that you’d] be able to find much more than it’s already here,” Herring said.  

The museum’s displays, covering medical instruments from Dr. George Floyd, educational history, the turpentine industry, and paintings by Francis Moore, have become more important as a result. 

Before integration, Hawthorne had a Black and white school, and yearbooks from both fill cases. Then, the schools merged and so did the yearbooks. Looking through a copy, Herring points to a young version of himself on the eve of graduation. 

“This is sort of the one place that fosters that continuity of the community’s history without conflict,” Herring said.