Editor's note: Burnt Church Cemetery is not included in the sale of the Bryan Neck Presbyterian Church Chapel. 

The congregation of Richmond Hill Presbyterian Church voted Sunday to sell Bryan Neck Presbyterian Church chapel, according to the church’s pastor.

The Rev. Jim Jackson announced the sale of “our beautiful and historic Bryan Neck Presbyterian Church building,” on Wednesday in an open letter to the RHPC congregation. You can read it here.

“Fortunately the building is on the register as an historic property. Thus, even though people are no longer worshipping there, I assert that the church has not died,” Jackson continued, adding that the church “lives with its beloved memories.”

The church celebrated its 125th anniversary in 2010.

A historical marker was erected in 2001 by the Georgia Historical Society, Richmond Hill Historical Society and Richmond Hill Presbyterian Church.

“This church, the oldest congregation in lower Bryan County, was certified by the Presbytery of Georgia in 1830,” the marker reads. “Its founders included rice planters on Bryan Neck, among them Thomas Savage Clay, Richard James Arnold and George Washington McAllister. The first meeting house was constructed in 1839 three miles north of this site on the Bryan Neck Road. The current sanctuary, the oldest public building in Bryan County, was built in 1885 after the first building burned. The cemetery, known as Burnt Church Cemetery, remains at the original site and includes the graves of the church’s prominent early members.”

While Jackson’s letter was short on details regarding the sale of the chapel, it said “as long as the spiritual descendants of that beloved body are alive (hopefully for many generations), Bryan Neck Presbyterian will be alive.”