Appalachian Churches Series – Mayo Memorial Church of Paintsville, Kentucky: Stone Faith in the John C. C. Mayo Era
On Third Street in Paintsville stands one of the clearest surviving monuments to the city’s early twentieth century transformation. The building entered the National Register of Historic Places in 1989 as “Mayo Methodist Church,” significant for architecture, with a period of significance in the early twentieth century and a significant year of 1909. Federal and state preservation records place it in the great wave of building that reshaped Paintsville during the John C. C. Mayo era, when the town was adding paved streets, utilities, schools, business blocks, and ambitious religious buildings that announced a new civic confidence.
The Kentucky Historic Resource Inventory prepared by Helen Powell in 1983 described the church as a two story stone building with a three story tower and identified W. A. Adams as builder. That same survey said the church was funded by John C. C. Mayo and built between 1904 and 1909 on a site locally remembered as the “Great Swamp.” The Johnson County multiple resource nomination reinforced that timeline and placed the church directly within Paintsville’s turn of the century expansion, noting that by 1910 the imposing stone church stood across from the Mayo Mansion on Third Street.
John C. C. Mayo and the Making of the Church
Mayo’s name is inseparable from the history of the church because the church belonged to a broader program of local investment that reshaped Paintsville. The Johnson County multiple resource nomination linked Mayo Methodist Church to the same years that saw his mansion rise across the street and city improvements move forward, including waterworks, electricity, and street paving. Kentucky historical-marker material on Mayo likewise remembers him not only as a coal and railroad figure, but as a local builder of schools, roads, and churches. In that setting, the church was not an isolated gift. It was part of a larger effort to project permanence, prosperity, and public standing in eastern Kentucky.
That local ambition is visible in the labor story attached to the church. Powell’s 1983 survey stated that Italian stone masons were brought in for the work and housed in temporary barracks stretching from Third Street toward Happy Hollow. The same craftsmen, according to the survey and the federal record derived from it, also worked on the Mayo Mansion. That detail matters because it ties the church to a remarkable burst of imported skill and masonry craftsmanship in Paintsville, showing that Mayo and his circle were willing to spend money not only on scale but on finish and spectacle.
Architecture, Materials, and Interior Finish
Architecturally, Mayo Memorial Church was one of the strongest Gothic Revival statements in Paintsville. The county nomination described the plan as cruciform and emphasized the three story crenellated bell tower, the ashlar stone walls, the double lancet windows, the stained glass, and the pointed arched doors. The state inventory likewise judged the church significant under Criterion C for the way it displayed the forms and materials associated with the Gothic Revival style. In a town where several churches were rebuilt or enlarged in these years, the nomination singled out the Gothic mode as the preferred language for new church construction after the turn of the century, and Mayo Methodist Church was one of its most striking local examples.
Its materials also connected the building to eastern Kentucky itself. The inventory called it a stone church, and a Kentucky geological source on the building stones of the state noted that stone from the Paintsville area was used in the construction of both John C. C. Mayo College and the Mayo Memorial Church, then identified with the Southern Methodist tradition. That geological reference helps explain why the church feels so rooted to place. Though shaped by skilled masons and revival design, it was also built from regional stone and made to look as if it belonged to the hills and creek bottoms around Paintsville.
The interior carried the same sense of ambition. Powell’s inventory recorded an oak interior and noted that the organ was a gift of Andrew Carnegie, supplied by the Pilcher Organ Company of Louisville in 1910. Even without an exhaustive room by room description, those details reveal the church as more than a plain mountain meetinghouse. It was conceived as a carefully appointed urban sanctuary, one that combined local stone, imported craftsmanship, stained glass, and a notable organ donation into a building meant to impress both worshipers and visitors.
A Landmark in the Paintsville Streetscape
The church’s location mattered almost as much as its design. The 1983 survey fixed the historic parcel at the northeast corner of Third and Court Streets, while present denominational directories still place the congregation at 325 Third Street. The Johnson County nomination stressed that by 1910 the church stood as a major stone edifice across from the Mayo Mansion, meaning that this short stretch of Third Street had become one of the most self conscious and symbolically loaded streetscapes in Paintsville. Mansion, church, school, and business development together created a civic core that presented Paintsville as a town of consequence.
Period visual evidence confirms that the building quickly entered the public image of the town. The Kentucky Historical Society postcard index includes item 15.018, titled “Mayo Memorial M. E. Church, South, Paintsville, KY,” published by Big Sandy Drug Co. That may seem like a small detail, but postcards mattered. A building that appeared on an early twentieth century postcard was a building people recognized as worthy of circulation, display, and local pride. By the time that image was marketed, the church had already become part of the visual identity of Paintsville.
From Mayo Methodist to Mayo Memorial
The surviving records also preserve the church’s changing name across time. Federal preservation files use “Mayo Methodist Church.” The early postcard index uses the fuller “Mayo Memorial M. E. Church, South.” Today the official Kentucky Conference and United Methodist directories identify the congregation as Mayo Memorial United Methodist Church at the same Third Street location. Those name changes reflect broader denominational history, but they also show continuity. Through architectural preservation, congregational life, and public memory, the building has remained recognizably the same institution even as the formal denominational language around it changed.
That continuity extends beyond the church itself into local archival memory. The Johnson County Public Library lists Robert M. Conley’s treatises on Mayo Memorial United Methodist Church among its notable local holdings, alongside John C. C. Mayo materials and other regional historical resources. Morehead State University’s manuscript finding aids also identify a John C. C. Mayo Research Collection assembled from materials gathered during work on Mayo’s biography. Together, those collections suggest that the church survives not only as a building but as a subject of serious local historical interest.
Why Mayo Memorial Church Still Matters
Mayo Memorial Church matters because it captures a decisive moment in the history of Paintsville and the Big Sandy Valley. It is a religious building, but it is also a work of civic display, a monument of local wealth, an expression of Gothic Revival taste, and a surviving piece of the John C. C. Mayo landscape. Its stone walls, tower, stained glass, and prominent siting tell the story of a mountain county seat that was trying to define itself as modern, prosperous, and culturally serious in the first decade of the twentieth century.
For Appalachian history, the church also offers a useful corrective to stereotypes. Buildings like this remind us that eastern Kentucky’s past was never only rough cabins, company camps, and extractive industry. It also included ambitious architecture, formal religious patronage, imported artisans, urban aspirations, and institutions built to last. Mayo Memorial Church endures because it was meant to endure, and because Paintsville’s early twentieth century builders wanted their town to look, and feel, permanent.
Sources & Further Reading
National Park Service. “Mayo Methodist Church.” NPGallery Digital Asset Detail, National Register Information System No. 88003152, January 26, 1989. https://npgallery.nps.gov/AssetDetail/cf88c825-ef01-4a69-b822-3b73177b35a4.
Powell, Helen. Kentucky Historic Resources Inventory: Mayo Methodist Church. 1983. https://npgallery.nps.gov/GetAsset/cf88c825-ef01-4a69-b822-3b73177b35a4.
National Register of Historic Places. Multiple Resources of Johnson County, Kentucky continuation sheet. https://npgallery.nps.gov/NRHP/GetAsset/NRHP/64000234_text.
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Paintsville, Johnson County, Kentucky. 1910. Plate 0001. Library of Congress image service. https://tile.loc.gov/image-services/iiif/service:gmd:gmd395m:g3954m:g3954pm:g032261910:03226_1910-0001/full/pct:100/0/default.jpg.
Sanborn Map Company. Sanborn Fire Insurance Map from Paintsville, Johnson County, Kentucky. 1921. Plate 0001. Library of Congress image service. https://tile.loc.gov/image-services/iiif/service:gmd:gmd395m:g3954m:g3954pm:g032261921:03226_1921-0001/full/pct:100/0/default.jpg.
Kentucky Historical Society. “Paintsville, Johnson County, KY,” item 15.018, “Mayo Memorial M. E. Church, South, Paintsville, KY.” Postcard index. https://www.kyhistory.com/digital/api/collection/LIB/id/2029/download.
Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Kentucky Conference. Minutes of the Kentucky Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Vol. 1908. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/30540815.1908.emory.edu.
Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Kentucky Conference. Minutes of the Kentucky Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. Vol. 1909. Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/30540815.1909.emory.edu.
Methodist Episcopal Church. 1910 Minutes of the Kentucky Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church: The Eighty-Fourth Annual Session. Asbury Seminary ePLACE. https://place.asburyseminary.edu/mechurchminutes/33/.
Johnson County Clerk. “Records.” https://johnson.countyclerk.us/records/.
Johnson County Clerk. “Online Land Records.” https://johnson.countyclerk.us/online-land-records/.
Johnson County Property Valuation Administrator. “Johnson County Property Valuation Administrator.” https://www.qpublic.net/ky/johnson/.
Johnson County Public Library. “Using Your Library.” https://johnsoncountypubliclibrary.org/using-your-library/.
Traum, Carolyn Hay. John C. C. Mayo Research Collection. Morehead State University Manuscripts Collections, 2022. https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1074&context=manuscripts_fa.
Turner, Carolyn Clay, and Carolyn Hay Traum. John C. C. Mayo: Cumberland Capitalist. Pikeville, KY: Pikeville College Press, 1983. https://books.google.com/books/about/John_C_C_Mayo_Cumberland_Capitalist.html?id=ZSImAAAAMAAJ.
Hall, Mitchel. Johnson County, Kentucky: A History of the County, and Genealogy of Its People Up to the Year 1927. Louisville, KY: Standard Press, 1928. https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uiug.30112025375194.
Connelley, William Elsey. Eastern Kentucky Papers: The Founding of Harman’s Station, with an Account of the Indian Captivity of Mrs. Jennie Wiley and the Exploration and Settlement of the Big Sandy Valley in the Virginias and Kentucky. New York: Torch Press, 1910. https://www.loc.gov/item/10028358/.
Ely, William. The Big Sandy Valley: A History of the People and Country from the Earliest Settlement to the Present Time. Catlettsburg, KY: Central Methodist, 1887. https://www.loc.gov/item/24020324/.
Richardson, Charles Henry. The Building Stones of Kentucky: A Detailed Report Covering the Examination, Analysis and Industrial Evaluation of the Principal Building Stone Deposits of the State. Frankfort, KY: Kentucky Geological Survey, 1923. https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Building_Stones_of_Kentucky.html?id=mqYRAAAAIAAJ.
ExploreKYHistory. “John C.C. Mayo.” https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/items/show/364.
ExploreKYHistory. “Paintsville.” https://explorekyhistory.ky.gov/items/show/363.
Kentucky Annual Conference of the United Methodist Church. “Paintsville Mayo Memorial.” https://www.kyumc.org/churchdetail/769370.
The United Methodist Church. “Mayo Memorial United Methodist Church.” https://www.umc.org/en/find-a-church/church?id=001Um00000PFEiWIAX.
Author Note: This article looks at Mayo Memorial Church not only as a place of worship, but also as a surviving monument to Paintsville’s transformation in the early twentieth century. By tracing the church through architecture, patronage, and local development, it shows how one building can reveal a much larger Appalachian story.