Built After Emancipation, Endowed With 200 Acres, Flattened by Melissa: The Story of St John’s Church, Black River

• St John’s Anglican Church in Black River traces its origins to the late 1600s
• The present building’s first stone was laid in 1837 and it was consecrated in 1843
• The church once owned more than 200 acres of glebe land in the Brompton area
• Hurricane Melissa destroyed the building in October 2025, leaving only the belfry

In December 2025 the Sunday Gleaner’s Paul H. Williams told the story of one of St Elizabeth’s oldest churches, weeks after Hurricane Melissa had destroyed it. St John’s Anglican Church in Black River has roots going back to a structure built between 1679 and 1723, and it is mentioned in John Campbell’s will of 1739.

The church most parishioners knew was begun in the years around emancipation. Its first stone was laid on July 13, 1837, under the Reverend Thomas Pierce Williams, and it was rebuilt in 1838, the year full freedom came. It was named St John’s and consecrated in 1843 by Bishop Christopher Lipscombe. Over the following decades it gained a clock in 1839, a bell cast at the Whitechapel Foundry in London in 1848, and a pipe organ built in England around 1911 and installed in 1915. It was reroofed in 1980.

The Gleaner’s history also shows how much property sat behind a parish church. St John’s owned more than 200 acres of glebe land in the Brompton area, and the article also links the parish’s story to Munro College and Hampton School, both established in the 1850s from bequests. Church, school and land grew up side by side.

Then came October 28, 2025. The Category 5 hurricane destroyed the building, leaving only the belfry standing, and the historic organ was lost. The article recalled words from the church’s 175th anniversary magazine in 2013: “The worship journey will continue long after we’re gone.”

For Black River and for Jamaica’s heritage, the loss is huge. It also raises practical questions that every historic congregation now faces: what insurance was in place, what the church’s land and endowments can contribute to rebuilding, and who holds the paperwork for glebe lands granted generations ago. For St Elizabeth families at home and abroad whose baptisms, weddings and funerals took place at St John’s, rebuilding is about memory as much as masonry, and a clear account of the church’s property will help decide how quickly it can rise again.

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