Our History

200 Years of Serving God

Methodist services on Yellow Leaf Creek began about 1818 when itinerant Methodist preachers and missionaries stopped off from their travels through the Mississippi Territory and preached in the log cabins of the settlers or out in the open by the light of pine knot torches. These early inhabitants of Shelby County were soon joined by many other families, one of which was the Lesters.

In the 1830s, Alfred Musgrove Lester was an overseer on a plantation near Columbia, South Carolina. He gave up that position in 1837 to go into the newly opened Indian lands of Alabama. He and his wife, Mary Ann Poindexter Lester, as well as other companions, journeyed by wagon some six generations ago to become settlers in Shelby County on land just then ceded to the United States by the Creek and Chocktaw Indians. The place near Yellow Leaf Creek where the Lesters and their associates put up their cabins, claimed the land, and erected their first log church has been known ever since as Lester's Chapel.

Caption: This photo is of the church's building three times removed from the current building. So far, we have been unable to determine the definite occasion that is depicted in the photo. Some people positively identified include G.W. Walton (first man in first row) and Roland M. Lester (teenager standing in right door,) also great grandson of Alfred M. Lester.

Lesters Chapels current building was completed in 1950, the fourth building so named. The sanctuary was renovated in 1987, and a gymnasium was added in the early 2000s. The site of the chapel on top of a hill where the highway curves south is historic, for at the nearby spring, men were mustered into the Confederate Army, and later, at the same place, the survivors were discharged in front of the church. Highway 47 intersects and then follows the Old Yellow Leaf Narrows and Double Oak Mountain trail used by Indians, explorers, trappers, traders, and settlers going to and from the Mississippi Territory.

Caption: This picture depicts the church in 1950 with the educational building added in the 1960s. In 1950, Robert M. Lester, a grandson of the founders of Lester Chapel, said, "The small country church is an essential element in American Life and must be maintained." May the people of this Shelby County Community continue to sustain Lesters Chapel in the years to come.

Listed in the Alabama Register of Landmarks and Heritage on December 10, 2010. Marker eructated in 2023 by the Joanne Lester Garrett Memorial Fund.

Around 1818, itinerant Methodist circuit riders traveled through the Mississippi Territory and organized church services. In 1837, Alfred Musgrove Lester and his wife, Mary Ann Poindexter Lester, left South Carolina and settled in Shelby County on land recently ceded to the United States by the Creek and Choctaw Indians. The Lesters and others erected their first log church in 1837 and called it Lesters Chapel Methodist Church. Sometime later, church members built a clapboard building which stood for decades.

In 1950, the church built the current building, which is the fourth one built by the church. This sanctuary contains the original pine floorboards, and some of the pews used in the clapboard building are still in use in the annexes. The church added a Sunday School annex in 1962, and gymnasium in 2004. The site of the church is historic in other ways; Civil War soldiers were mustered, and survivors were discharged at nearby Yellow Leaf Creek. Many fine preachers have served Lesters Chapel, including Alfred Musgrove Lester's son, Samuel P. Lester, for whom Lester Memorial Church in Oneonta, Alabama is named.

Caption: Today, family members and descendants of the Lesters still worship and serve Lesters Chapel today.