Joppa Missionary Baptist Church & Cemetery

Joppa Missionary Baptist Church & Cemetery is a historic church and burial ground on Brownsville Road, in the wooded Joppa Ridge and Elko area of Mammoth Cave National Park. It’s a modest heritage stop, but it gives you a close look at the communities that occupied this land before it became a park. The National Park Service describes the grounds and cemetery as open for day use; the cemetery sits just behind the church. Its page doesn’t specify whether the building interior is open.

The congregation was established in 1862 and first called Pleasant Union. Early meetings took place in a log schoolhouse on these grounds, after a Baptist minister’s visits to John Bailey Blair’s home helped bring the congregation together. In 1880, families across a five- to six-square-mile area had no church nearby. The log building was replaced by the small wood-frame church that still stands here, built around 1900.

Before Mammoth Cave National Park was formed, nearly 600 families lived across about 30 rural communities on this land. As the park took shape in the 1920s and 1930s, homesites and fields disappeared into forest, and all but three of roughly a dozen churches were demolished. Joppa is one of the three still standing. Descendants still return for annual homecomings, keeping the area’s family history connected to the church.

The small white frame building sits among trees, with the cemetery immediately behind it. This is a compact outdoor visit for anyone interested in the park’s human history. Walk around the church, then continue to the cemetery; for a photo, include some of the wooded setting so the surviving church reads as part of the old community landscape. The site’s listed amenity is historical and interpretive information; no food service is listed.