The cornerstone reads, “Beebe Memorial/ C. M. E. Church/Organized 1872./Erected 1927./Rev. G. R. Galphin. P. C./ McKissack & McKissack, Archt’s.” The author would like to thank Dell Upton for calling attention to this church and its cornerstone and the importance of the architects, and for a photograph of the cornerstone. The congregation is named for its founder, Joseph A. Beebe, a formerly enslaved shoemaker and minister who established North Carolina’s first Colored Methodist Episcopal congregation at this site. For more on the history of the CME church generally, see Reginald F. Hildebrand, The Times Were Strange and Stirring: Methodist Preachers and the Crisis of Emancipation (1995).