Former Methodist Church, Coventry (1867)

Coventry was the birthplace of Lorenzo Dow (1777-1834), the famous itinerant Methodist preacher and major figure of the Second Great Awakening. The earliest records of a Methodist Society in town date to 1822, but there were no doubt Methodist meetings in town before then. The town’s first Methodist church was built in the 1840s, in what is now Patriot’s Park. In 1867, it was replaced with a new Italianate-style church, erected on Main Street in South Coventry. The church lost its steeple in the 1938 hurricane and it was never replaced. By 1944, membership in the church had dwindled such that the remaining parishioners could no longer maintain the building. In 1949, they merged with the Bolton Methodist Church. The former Coventry Methodist Church was used for a number of years as a community house for meetings and gatherings and in the 1990s contained antiques stores. In 2003, it was refurbished as retail space.