BETHEL METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH 

Not much information could be found on this church other than it appearing on maps next to Bethel Cemetery in the southwest corner of section 3,  Jones Township, in the 1876 Centennial Sketches by Colby,  the 1894 Union County Plat Book and a 1912 Union County Road Map. It was apparently abandoned by 1916 as it does not appear in the County Plat Book of that year.

In Lorimort he First Hundred Years, 1987, Mrs. Henry Weber recalled the following: as I think back of the Evangelical Church, recollections take me back to the [18]70s when our parents would hitch a team to a wagon and take their children to church and Sunday school in Thayer.  ………[after a time] the church in Thayer became unsafe and was sold. It was torn down and a house was made of the material. Services were then held in a little church in the Bethel Cemetery. This church was built of lumber from an old school house that stood just south of the William Wycoff residence, before the Beulah schoolhouse was built. Another association [Methodist Episcopal] owned the church in the Bethel Cemetery and the dates [meeting times] of the two denominations conflicted, so the Evangelical group later held their services in the Beulah schoolhouse.

On page 3 of the Creston DailyGazette January 17, 1887 was published the following: Protracted meetings are being held in the Breezy Ridge schoolhouse, Union Township, in charge of Rev. Mr. Reed, also in New Bethel Church, Jones Township, in charge of Rev. Mr. McCauley of Thayer, and at Auter Beal (probably ment to be Otterbein) chapel, Jones Township.

Assuming the church building shown in the 1876 map was the one built from materials from an old school house, then perhaps it was rebuilt about 1887 because the Gazette newspaper article talks about it being a New Bethel  Church.