Before there was a building, there were families gathering under the shade trees on Euclid Avenue. The McElwain community — named for Wallace S. McElwain, whose Cahaba Iron Works had given this part of Shades Valley its first industrial settlement decades earlier — had no church of its own through most of the nineteenth century. That changed on December 27, 1895, when a small group held the first official meeting of McElwain Baptist Church in a white frame building they had constructed themselves at a total cost of $542.15. They hired the area’s only ordained minister, W.Y. Browning, to preach on the third Sunday of each month. It was a modest start for what would become one of the longest-running institutions in the neighborhood.
By the late 1920s, the community had outgrown that original frame church. Under pastor Oscar Lee Hurtt, the church selected a building committee — Ed and Willie Kirk Baker and Will E. Watkins — and set about replacing the white frame building with brick. Refusing to go into debt, they waited until they could pay for the needed materials. Much of the labor was donated, just as it had been for the original church. On April 14, 1929, McElwain dedicated its new brick church house. The new building even had a baptistry under the choir loft — though there was no running water. When a baptism was planned, the Bakers filled milk cans with water from their spring, heated it, and loaded the cans onto dairy delivery trucks to bring to the church.
From that brick building on Montevallo Road, the church grew into the center of community life in McElwain. The church ran education programs, clothing drives, youth mission groups like the Royal Ambassadors, and community events that held the neighborhood together through the Depression, two World Wars, and the suburban expansion that reshaped Birmingham after 1945. Joe William Baker, who grew up in McElwain during the 1930s, remembered the church as the place where nearly all social activity in the area was centered. In 1967, the congregation moved across the street into its current building — the third home for a church that started under the shade trees.
McElwain Baptist Church operated continuously on Montevallo Road for 125 years. On November 1, 2020, Shades Mountain Baptist Church adopted the congregation, and the church was renamed Hope Community Church — a new chapter, but not a break from the past. The building still stands where it always has, and the Crestline Neighborhood Association still meets there on the fourth Thursday of every month. The McElwain name may have come off the sign, but the role this church plays in the community — gathering place, support system, shared ground — is the same one it has played since those first families pulled their chairs under the shade trees on Euclid Avenue, one hundred and thirty years ago.
Sources: Benitey, Elna Jean “Eljee” Young. McElwain Baptist Church: One Hundred Years, 1895–1995. Baker, Joe William. A Time When… (1993).
Crestline Neighborhood Association · Local History Series