The Oldest Church in UA Was Yet to be in UA

In 1923, Perry Township’s Marble Cliff Methodist Episcopal Church had already been through several transformations. The church’s congregation started to worship in 1842 at the current corner of Lane Avenue and Tremont Road. The building, named Kellogg Chapel for a Methodist circuit rider, was a log barn. This temporary church relocated in 1849 to a stone chapel at what is now Riverside Drive and Lane Avenue. That building was damaged by explosions at the nearby rock quarry. A new site was purchased on Zollinger and Kioka, and quarry owners donated stone for a new structure, completed in 1917.

According to Riverside Church History: 1842-1978, in June of 1923 all indebtedness was paid and a mortgage burning was held. The congregation swiftly purchased a lot west of the church facing today’s Zollinger Road in October of 1923 to establish a parsonage.

Today this congregation has a different name — Riverside United Methodist Church (1938) — but its current church building did not fall within city limits until the land was annexed in 1954. Constructed in 1917, it is the oldest church in Upper Arlington.