ARCHIVES & LIBRARY
Barratt's Chapel Museum houses a research library emphasizing Methodist history and the archives of the Peninsula-Delaware Annual Conference. The archives contain a wide variety of material dating from the eighteenth century to the present, including membership records of closed churches, annual conference records, sermons, memoirs, and personal papers of, among others, Ezekiel Cooper and Bishop Levi Scott. These facilities are open to the public and are used by many persons doing Methodist-related genealogy, writing local church histories, and pursuing other Methodist research.
If time permits, the curator will help with very limited research requests. If you contact us by e-mail, please include your mailing address. If you plan on doing more extensive research, please contact the curator to make an appointment.
CONFERENCE JOURNALS
Digital copies of all the journals in the collection of Barratt's Chapel are available below.
[Note: The congregations which make up the present Peninsula-Delaware Conference of The United Methodist Church came from five separate annual conferences in three different denominations. A chart is available here. For more information contact the staff of Barratt's Chapel Museum.]
Wilmington Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church
Maryland Conference, Methodist Protestant Church
Delaware Conference, Methodist Episcopal Church/Methodist Church
Some of these are from the collections of the General Commission on Archives and History and the library of Drew University. Some journals are not complete, but these are the best copies we have available at this time.
PERIODICALS
Peninsula Methodist
The Peninsula Methodist, originally titled the Conference Worker, was published in Wilmington, Delaware, from 1875-1908. Although not an official publication of the conference, it was dedicated to news of the Wilmington Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church. Barratt's Chapel has a collection from 1884 to 1890 with a few copies of later dates. The collection can be found here in searchable PDF files.