A quick guide to visiting Soapstone

The church website welcomes visitors to worship and announces special events. Treat the property as a working church and a burial place: give services and grieving families space, and follow the marked visitor route. For a history-focused visit, open the Soapstone Preservation Endowment’s self-guided tour before you arrive. Its map connects the buildings with the soapstone boulder, sculpture, mine, spring, historic cemetery, and historical marker.

Liberia: making a home after emancipation

The church and its preservation partners trace Liberia’s beginnings to 1865, when formerly enslaved families established a community here after emancipation. Land ownership was central to that story. In the historical account published on the church’s history page, anthropologist John M. Coggeshall explains that some former slaveholders exchanged less desirable land for labor when they lacked cash to pay newly freed workers. For families who obtained that land, it offered a place to farm, maintain households, and build their own institutions.

That history gives the mountain setting a different meaning. Seclusion was useful to people, creating space for family life, religion, and education after slavery. The church’s account names Joseph McJunkin among the formerly enslaved people connected with the community’s beginnings. Liberia belongs in the history of Black Appalachia, alongside the wider story of Reconstruction and the struggle to hold land and rights afterward.

For the regional background, our guide to what an 1860 census map reveals about slavery in the South Carolina Upstate helps put this community’s beginnings in context. The story of freedom here starts with understanding the system its founders had survived.

The beginnings of the church—and the name Liberia

Soapstone’s history reaches into the years immediately following the Civil War. Its South Carolina historical marker identifies the Rev. Joseph McJunkin as the congregation’s organizer and places its likely organization in the 1870s. The church itself traces its roots to 1865. Both accounts link worship to a brush arbor, a shelter of branches remembered in the community’s early history. The marker also preserves the tradition that early lessons took place on the nearby soapstone outcropping.

The name Liberia has its own family history. The church’s account records a McJunkin family tradition that Joseph named the settlement for an African homeland. Coggeshall offers a different interpretation, connecting the name with postwar interest in emigration to Liberia. The family account is an oral tradition, and the emigration connection is the scholar’s interpretation; neither establishes Joseph’s birthplace. The church’s historical discussion documents the use of Liberia in older newspapers and family records, rather than treating it as a recently invented name.

A school beside the sanctuary

Education was part of the community’s work long before the separate schoolhouse. The state marker records an African American public school in the church by the 1890s and identifies 1953 as the closing year of Soapstone School. The surviving building dates to the 1920s; the church identifies its construction year as 1928. Its modest size should not obscure its importance: this was a local place for Black children to attend school under segregation.

The Endowment’s schoolhouse history describes a building that later became storage, followed by rehabilitation beginning in 2024 by Harper General Contractors. Period furnishings were added in 2025. The church now reports that the schoolhouse museum has been dedicated. Contact the church for interior access rather than assuming that a dedicated museum has daily staffed opening hours.

When you visit, look at the school and church together. The two buildings make the connection between education and religious life in Liberia visible. Elsewhere in the valley, the Oolenoy Community Center’s schoolhouse history offers another local perspective on the community institutions that grew around classrooms.

Two cemeteries, and lives behind the names

Soapstone has two burial grounds: the cemetery near the church and an older cemetery to the south, identified in the site’s visitor materials as the Slave Cemetery. That historic name refers to people born into slavery; it does not mean that everyone buried there died before emancipation. The church’s cemetery guide identifies individuals and family relationships, turning a walk among the stones into a more personal encounter with Liberia’s history.

One hand-carved marker bears the name Chanie Kimp, which the church identifies as Chaney Kemp, born enslaved around 1824. The church’s account follows her son Emerson into freedom and records the family in Liberia by 1880. Other legible markers include that of the Rev. A. R. Gowens, who lived from 1845 to 1928. Fieldstones and depressions mark additional graves. A stone without a readable name still marks someone’s burial place.

Follow the designated path and stay within the cemetery’s split-rail fence. The church specifically asks visitors not to make grave rubbings because the soft stones are easily damaged. Leave markers, flowers, rocks, and other memorial objects in place. The church’s cemetery page also provides directions to the older burial ground from Flyroot Drive.

The 1967 fire and the work of rebuilding

The wooden church burned in 1967. Upstate Forever’s preservation account identifies the burning as a Ku Klux Klan attack and describes Lula Mae, Mable Owens Clarke’s mother, leading the effort to rebuild. The schoolhouse survived. Congregants sold farm produce to raise money for the replacement sanctuary, and the pastor’s masonry skills helped turn those materials into a building.

The Endowment’s church tour dates the present church’s opening to 1968. It describes the pastor laying the concrete blocks as the congregation gathered the resources to continue. The building visitors see today therefore carries the history of a deliberate return to worship after violence. Its plain exterior reflects a much larger story of labor, fundraising, and persistence.

Mable Owens Clarke and the promise that kept Soapstone open

For many people beyond Liberia, Mable Owens Clarke’s fish fries introduced them to Soapstone. In her first-person account, published by Upstate Forever in 2022, Clarke explained that she had promised her dying mother she would keep the church’s doors open. Monthly meals raised money toward church debts, and the effort eventually drew support well beyond Pickens County.

Clarke also described bringing volunteers together to uncover the overgrown historic cemetery. Food also helped gather people for that work: she offered lunch to those who came to help clear it. These accounts connect the familiar fish-fry story with a larger purpose—maintaining worship, protecting the property, and restoring dignity to people buried there. The Endowment now records the final fish fry in its news archive, so visitors should use current church announcements for upcoming events.

Protecting the land and the buildings

In 2022, a conservation easement permanently protected the six-acre church property. Upstate Forever states that the protection covers the church, schoolhouse, and historic cemetery and prevents development such as residential subdivisions or commercial operations. Keeping this land intact preserves the relationships among those places, rather than saving a single building detached from its setting.

Preservation also requires money for ordinary work. The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s 2025 grant announcement included Soapstone in its Preserving Black Churches program, with support directed toward an endowment for recurring maintenance, insurance, and preservation management. The Soapstone Preservation Endowment reports a $250,000 award in 2025 and achievement of its $1 million fundraising goal that year. Its news page also records the new Highway 11 wayfinding sign announced in May 2026.

The Endowment supports the property’s preservation and history; the congregation funds the church’s operating budget. Visitors who want to help can choose the appropriate organization through the official sites. Long-term stewardship means keeping roofs, buildings, grounds, and interpretation in good order as well as keeping the story in public view.

Read more, then explore the valley

For a fuller history, John M. Coggeshall’s Liberia, South Carolina: An African American Appalachian Community, published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2018, follows five generations of the Owens family and their neighbors. Based on extensive interviews, it connects family memory with the history of slavery, Reconstruction, segregation, and the community’s continued relationship with its land.

Continue exploring through our guide to historic churches of Pumpkintown and the Oolenoy Valley, the story of Griffin Baptist Church, and the Pumpkintown visitor guide. Give Soapstone time of its own within that trip. The school, graves, and sanctuary reward a visit that includes reading the names and following the story across the hill.