(Content Courtesy Fox59/CBS4) This small building holds the vibrant history of Lebanon’s Black community. Today, it is owned by Missy and Kevin Krulik.
“I know that the congregation, through the information we found in the newsletters, they formed in about 1870,” she said.
Missy Krulik, who has a self-proclaimed passion for history, went to the county courthouse and found the deed when the congregation purchased the land in 1879.
“They found a local contractor to build it,” she said. “They built it for $650. And they had their first service here in June of 1880.”
“The Black church building is really one of the central nodes of this tradition,” said Joseph Tucker Edmonds, an associate professor of religious and Africana studies at IU Indianapolis.
Edmonds explained the Black church’s origins, going all the way back to slavery.
“For the enslaved Africans who came here to this country, religion originally looked like them meeting outside of the site and the view of the enslavers and bringing their traditions from the African continent and practicing those,” he said. “As they began to realize that many of those traditions aligned or overlapped with the Christian tradition, they began to merge those two.”
Edmonds said that after emancipation, formerly enslaved people moved into the public view. A big part of that was building church spaces.
“They were able to now build churches and build institutions that brought together folks, especially in the American South, that they could meet, that they could talk, that they could organize,” he said. “Oftentimes, those churches were the economic, political and cultural engines of most of those communities.”
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Source: City of Lebanon — Local Couple Restoring AME Church, 2026-02-24.