Connecting Columbia Union Seventh-day Adventists

Video: What Happened to Lucy Byard?

Are you planning to visit Washington, D.C.? There is a neighborhood that has several landmarks of historical significance to Adventists.

Stop by the former “People’s Church” (2105 Tenth St., NW) on your way to Freedmen’s Hospital (13th and R Streets, NW), where Lucy Byard died. Nearby, on the campus of Howard University (2400 6th St., NW and Georgia Ave.), Adventist women formed the Committee for the Advancement of Worldwide Work Among Colored Seventh-day Adventists in Spring 1944. The committee discussed how Black people would have full representation in the Church. These conversations, combined with Lucy Byard’s story, were the catalysts for the formation of regional conferences.

Though the building has since been torn down, Dodson’s Bookshop on Georgia Avenue was the first site for Allegheny Conference’s headquarters, established in 1945.

Images courtesy General Conference Office of Archives; and created through Adobe Firefly generative AI.

The Columbia Union Conference—which covers the Mid-Atlantic region of the United States—is home to many locations where people of the Seventh-day Adventist faith made (and continue to make) history. But how did the greater Washington, D.C., area become a church hub in the first place? And where can one find impactful, lesser-known historic sites within the Columbia Union territory?

Take a road trip with historians Michael Campbell, North American Division director of Archives, Statistics, and Research, and Phillip Warfield, a Ph.D. candidate studying United States 20th Century History at Howard University (D.C.), as they introduce—or for some, reintroduce—several interesting and exciting Adventist spots you and your family can visit this summer. So, grab your hiking boots and sunscreen because we’re off!

Find more details and history in our online articles!

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