Thimbleby Primitive Methodist chapel

Main Street, Thimbleby LN9 5RE

1857 Thimbleby Primitive Methodist chapel
Keith Guyler 1995

Thimbleby is west of Horncastle. T Clark for the Primitive Methodists missioned the village around 1822 but the society of up to 30 members lasted only until 1831. The society revived in 1843 when the Priestley and Dawson families moved in to the village. Bro Priestley provided a piece of land he had recently bought and Thimbleby Primitive Methodist chapel was opened on October 18th 1857. At this time the village had around 500 inhabitants.

Opening preachers included C Kendall, W Richardson and A Johnson who wrote about the opening in the 1858 Primitive Methodist magazine. 140 people were fed – and donated money – at the opening tea-meeting. The total cost was £110 of which they had raised around £43 at the time of opening. Special thanks were due to Mesdames Priestley and Cade.

It closed in 1995 and was used for storage. Later it was converted into a house – Eglise Cottage.

location: TF 237700


Reference

Primitive Methodist magazine January 1858 p.47

 

Comments about this page

  • Glad you found the information helpful Andrea. You can read a bit more detail of the chapel and and the role of the Priestley family in the Primitive Methodist magazine mentioned on the page. To find it, go to the “Research resources” page of this website and follow the link.
    In relation to only two of the family being buried in the churchyard, people who were members of churches other than the Church of England, such as Quakers, Methodists and Baptists, were not allowed to be buried in Church of England consecrated ground. Instead, some denominations had their own burial places; separate records for these will exist. Alternatively, there was often a separate, unconsecrated area of ground as part of the churchyard or outside the churchyard wall.

    By Christopher Hill (14/04/2019)
  • So interested to read this, thank you. My mother was a Priestley and we visited Thimbleby this week to do a bit family history. The Priestleys who had the house next to the chapel were an enormous family (17-23 children…) so that would swell the numbers of the Methodists in the village considerably. We attended the Methodist Sunday school in Sheffield in the 1950s and assumed it was just because it was local. Now see there was a strong Methodist tradition in the family. Do you think there is more detail somewhere on this? It is a bit of a mystery that despite there being so many of them, there are just 2 Priestleys buried in the local churchyard, the father and one of the sons.

    By Andrea Gregory (12/04/2019)
  • More detail of the opening of the chapel has been added from an account in the Primitive Methodist magazine.

    By Christopher Hill (11/04/2017)

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