In 2001 the Kentucky African American Heritage Commission awarded the City of Oakland a grant to complete a study of the historical unincorporated community of Sunnyside in Warren County. Gray & Pape, Inc. of Cincinnati contracted with the City of Oakland to prepare the study with the Principal Investigator, Lena Sweeten, donating her services on a pro bono basis. Sweeten, who has a Bachelor’s degree in history from WKU and a Master’s degree in Historic Preservation from Middle Tennessee State University, is a native of Warren County. The product of her work was compiled into a report entitled Writ Upon the Landscape: An Architectural Survey of the Sunnyside Community. In the study she acknowledged that "the Loving Union CME Church has been the heart of Sunnyside’s African American community." Using text from the report, this article attempts to put the church in its historical landscape and then provides information about its cultural significance.

    The unincorporated Sunnyside community is one of only three historic African American communities in Warren County that have been documented with archival investigations or architectural surveys. The community is a historically significant, tangible link from the post-Civil War period to the present, and is illustrative of the development and evolution of African American life in Warren County during the twentieth century. The report documented 53 buildings in the Sunnyside community and recommended that the Loving Union CME Church and its adjacent cemetery be nominated for listing on National Register of Historic Places.

    Sunnyside, consists of approximately 53 residences and a church, strung along Loving, Sunnyside-Gott, and Glasgow (US68/SR 80) roads in northern Warren County. It is approximately five miles southwest of the Freeport community. Like Freeport, Sunnyside is a historically African American community that was established by freed slaves shortly after the Civil War. The source of the community’s name, Sunnyside, is unknown. The settlement has not been previously documented and few written records are available concerning its history. As the community grew, it fanned out in an east/west direction along both Loving Road and Glasgow Road and ultimately merged with the white-owned section of the Sunnyside community.

    Edna Annalee Davidson, who moved to the Sunnyside community around 1927, recalled in oral interviews several interesting tidbits about the town’s growing years. She graduated from the eighth grade from the Sunnyside schoolhouse and married at the age of eighteen. She and her husband lived on various farms for about ten years, then bought a house from a relative in the early 1940s. There were only about ten houses along Loving Road when Edna and her husband bought their property in the early 1940s. Edna described them as "little huts. Some had windows. Some had rags stuck in the windows, you know, where the lights had broken out [and there wasn’t] siding on them...just plain wood-framed houses." Most of these modest dwellings are no longer extant; families moved away or property owners died and the buildings were left to "rot to the ground." The newer ranch houses and trailers that currently exist along Loving Road were added after the road was paved sometime in the 1960s.

    Edna recalls that the main commercial building in Sunnyside was a combined post office and store that also included a waiting room for the train. Lorena Hendricks managed both the post office and store for a number of years. The building was located on the same property as the farm Lorena owned with her husband, Virgil, at 296 Sunnyside-Gott Road. The store offered groceries, including bacon, canned goods, flour, cornmeal, sugar, lard, corn, and beans, as well as bolts of fabric for making clothes, ready made pants, underwear, socks, and a "little of everything." A gas pump was located just outside the store. After Virgil died, Lorena sold the store and moved to Bowling Green. Another Hendricks ran the store for a while, but it soon closed. The store was torn down in the 1970s.

    During Edna’s youth, as least three L&N trains went through Sunnyside on a daily basis, the Numbers 4, 5 and 6. The Number 5 could be taken to Bowling Green, with return service provided on the Number 6. Each morning, a mail sack would be place on a hook adjacent to the railroad tracks and the train could pick up the mail without stopping. Each evening, another mail sack would be tossed from the passing train. Lorena Hendricks would sort the mail and John Haynes, who was the postman for many years, delivered it.

    Ruth Mae Ellison Whobry Simpson, who was raised by the Hendricks from the age of nine, took over running the post office after Lorena moved to Bowling Green. Ruth came to Sunnyside in the early 1930s, at which time she recalls that there were only about seven houses along Sunnyside-Gott Road, including the Hendricks’ farm. Virgil Hendricks raised tobacco and also owned a threshing machine, which he took with a work crew to different farms to thresh wheat and barley during harvest time. Ruth recollects that Sunnyside’s white families attended church at the Mizpah Church on Mizpah Road. White children attended the public school at Bristow on Louisville Road. After Lorena Hendricks retired, Ruth operated the post office from her house instead of Lorena’s old store. Ruth served as postmistress for only 9 years; mail service in Sunnyside ceased when a large postal distribution facility was constructed in Bowling Green.

    One of the most important structures in the heart of Sunnyside’s African American community is the Loving Union CME Church. It is located on the east side of Loving Road, just north of 1295 Loving Road. On historic maps, this church is identified simply as Union Church. An associated cemetery includes tombstones that date to the early 1870s, suggesting that the congregation and surrounding community were established during the Reconstruction period, if not earlier. If so, this church ranks among the oldest of the churches affiliated with the Christian Methodist Episcopal (CME) denomination, which was formally organized in December 1870. At that time, a group of approximately 40 African American Methodists and members of the Capers Memorial CME Church in Nashville met in Jackson, Tennessee. Their purpose was to break away from the white-controlled Methodist Episcopal Church, South and create an independent denomination that was more reflective of issues important to the black community. The original name for the convention was the Colored Methodist Episcopal church, a moniker that was not changed until 1954. Two preachers, William Henry Miles of Kentucky and Richard H. Vanderhorst of Georgia, were elected to serve as the denomination’s first bishops.

    Compared to other African American denominations, especially the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) and African Methodist Episcopal Zion (AMEZ), the CME convention was somewhat conservative. Segregated Methodist churches from the antebellum period were somewhat conservative. Segregated Methodist churches from the antebellum period comprised most of its initial members. White conservatives within the Methodist Episcopal church, South had encouraged their black brethren not to join the AME or AMEZ movements, but rather to establish a separate denomination. According to scholars, their strategy served several purposes: it separated the races during a period of increasing racial prejudice; it ended white responsibility for financial support of black Methodists’ activities; and it maintained informal ties with former slaves in a relationship designed to assure their continued social subservience to the white-controlled denomination. In 1870, the Methodist Episcopal Church, South turned over to the CME all titles to "colored church property," making the separation of white and black Methodists official while still maintaining a sense of cordiality between the two groups.

    Although many northern African American church leaders derided the CME denomination as the "old slave church," the organization served the needs of its Southern constituents quite well. Most of the CME’s first leaders were themselves former slaves, with whom CME members could identify more readily than with the educated, more prosperous leaders of northern churches. The CME churches eschewed the more overt political and social activity needs of members. CME congregations grew rapidly, claiming 78,000 members by 1880, and 103,000 by 1890. The vast majority of these members resided in Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, and Mississippi, with a comparatively much smaller number in Kentucky. By the 1920’s, however, as the Great Migration took an unprecedented number of African Americans to northern states, the CME denomination began increasingly politically by providing meetings sites and voter registration centers and supporting activist ministers. This was the same period that the CME convention changed its name to the Christian Methodist Episcopal church.

    Presently, the CME church has more than 3,000 congregations with over 800,000 members in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa. The convention operates missions and relief agencies in Ghana, Nigeria, and Liberia. In the United States, the CME denomination supports scholastic endeavors, particularly the operation of four colleges, Lane College (Jackson, TN), Paine College (Augusta, GA), Texas College (Tyler, TX), and Miles College (Birmingham, AL).

    The land for the Loving Union CME Church and cemetery reportedly was given to Sunnyside’s African American residents by the Cole family, who lived on nearby Mizpah Road. They also donated a pulpit, benches, three chairs, a set of oil lamps, and a communion table that had been used at a white-owned church on Mizpah Road. The extant church replaced an earlier frame building that was in roughly the same location, although it was oriented on a north/south axis. This church building dated to at least 1927, when Edna Davidson arrived in Sunnyside, but the exact date of construction is unknown. Documentary information concerning the early history of the church is scanty, as most of the church records were destroyed in a fire at the residence of Tom and Clara Sharp. Mrs. Davidson speculated that the frame church had been in place for many years by the time she moved to Sunnyside, "I don’t know exactly how long it was, but all I know, the Coles that gave them their land to build a church was old people, so it must have been there a lot of years before I come down here."

    The current church building was erected in 1948, during the tenure of Reverend J. J. Mann. He reportedly brought in a contractor, who was paid by the CME convention, to oversee the church’s construction. A dedication stone that stands next to the church’s front door bears the following inscription: "Loving /Union /CME Church /Rebuilt 1948 / By/ Rev. J. J. Mann/ Pastor/ Trustees/ Tom Sharp/ J. Davidson/ N. Oldham/ Clara Shobe/ Myrtle White/ B. Martin/ M. Haynes". The church itself is an unpretentious concrete clock building with a corner tower and tall, rectangular windows. A wing on the south side houses a dining room and kitchen, which were added by the congregation after the sanctuary was constructed.

    Many local families were church members for several generations, including the families of Tom Sharp, Grundy Hibbitt, Tom Hayes, Luther Hayes, John Hayes, Ed Shobe, and Ellis Patterson. The CME convention typically rotates pastors to different congregations on a regular basis. Other ministers Edna Davidson recalls serving at the church included Reverends Crenshaw, Johnson, Brown, and Dinwiddie. At seven years,

    Reverend Dinwiddie’s term was the longest that Edna recollects. Presently, Greg Bonner, who lives in Lexington, is the pastor for the church. During the early to mid-twentieth century, the congregation was comprised of virtually all the African American families who lived along Loving and Glasgow roads. The privately owned Porter Lane often was used by church members who lived on Glasgow Road as a shortcut to reach the church. Presently, the congregation consists of around thirty members who attend on a regular basis. Many drive from Bowling Green each week to go to services.

    Churches historically have been the center of rural African American communities, a tendency that is evident in the histories of the Stony Point and Freeport settlements. The same is true for the Sunnyside community. In the early twentieth century, a one-room schoolhouse for Sunnyside’s African American children was located on the same grounds as the Loving Union CME Church on Loving Road. It is not known when this school was established. The school offered first through eighth grades, which represented the full extent of public education available to most of Sunnyside’s children during the early to mid-twentieth century. No high schools for African American children existed in Warren County, and no busses ran to the racially segregated high schools in Bowling Green. If a child had no family friends or relatives to stay with in Bowling Green during the school year, they were unable to continue their schooling. According to Edna Davidson, after the Freeport school was constructed in 1937, Sunnyside students started attending school there. Kenneth Fant, an African American resident of Freeport, drove the school bus for the children. The Sunnyside school was torn down in 1948, when the current church was constructed.

    Other activities that have taken place on a regular basis at the church over the years have included weddings, funerals, Bible meetings, and Christmas programs. One of the most important events has been a homecoming that has taken place annually for decades. Traditionally held in August (but now taking place on the fourth Sunday in May), the homecoming also has functioned as a de facto family reunion for many families, with multiple generations attending from as far away as Michigan, Tennessee, Indiana, and Ohio. According to Edna, during the homecoming, the "church is full and people are standing outside for the service. Sometimes a Greyhound bus brings in a load of people from out of town. The dining room and the chapel are full." After services, everyone sits down to enjoy a potluck dinner wherever space is available to spread out a blanket. Although the size of the church congregation has diminished over the years, the Loving Union CME Church clearly retains a significant place in the life of the Sunnyside community.