A Crossroads with a Preacher’s Name

Terrell grew up at one road junction: Sherrills Ford Road (SR 1848) and NC 150, the old Beatties Ford Road, in the southeast corner of Catawba County. It has never been incorporated. The North Carolina Gazetteer says only that the community was “named for an early Methodist minister in the vicinity.” The 1986 National Register nomination for the Terrell Historic District adds that he was a Rehobeth Methodist minister. It also repeats a cheerful local tradition: he was supposedly the area’s first Methodist minister to leave his church and community with all his bills paid. Wikipedia, citing a Terrell family history, names him as Pinckney Lawson Terrell (1853–1926), a circuit-riding preacher. That identification comes from family sources and has not been confirmed in a state record.

Before the stores came, the junction was a county militia muster ground, according to the nomination. Settlement in this part of the county followed the same river crossings described in the Sherrills Ford chapter. The Catawba peoples’ homeland along the river came first. Adam Sherrill’s family crossed the Catawba in 1747, and many of the farm families who later traded at Terrell were Sherrills.

Rehobeth and the Camp-Meeting Frontier

Terrell’s oldest institution is its church. The nomination describes Rehobeth Methodist Church as organized before 1791 and the oldest Methodist congregation west of the Catawba River in North Carolina. The county’s 1989 National Register multiple property survey gives 1791 as the founding date. It says the first church was built of hewn logs and had a shed for “colored people,” a reminder that enslaved and free Black worshippers attended from the start, though they were segregated. The name appears in both spellings, Rehobeth and Rehoboth, in state sources.

The man most associated with Rehobeth is Daniel Asbury (1762–1825). His NCpedia biography is full of frontier drama. Born in Fairfax County, Virginia, he was captured by Shawnee in Kentucky as a teenager, taken into Canada, and held as a British prisoner at Detroit. After his conversion he entered the Methodist traveling ministry in 1786. In 1787 he was sent to North Carolina, where he spent most of the rest of his life. He served fourteen years as a presiding elder, married Nancy L. Morris in Lincoln County and raised eleven children. He was a friend and co-worker of Bishop Francis Asbury but no relation. He died at home on April 15, 1825, and is buried at Rehoboth Church. The Terrell nomination calls him the church’s founder and notes his gravestone in the cemetery.

Asbury is also credited with starting the region’s camp meetings here. The county survey says Daniel Asbury led the first Rehobeth camp meeting in 1794 and calls it the first in North Carolina. The Rock Springs Camp Meeting in Denver traces its own origin to the same event. Its history says Asbury “started the movement at nearby Terrell in 1794.” The meetings stayed for three or four years and then moved through Bethel Methodist Church and Roby’s Camp Ground before settling at Rock Spring in 1830. NCpedia’s camp-meetings entry (Lynne S. Lepley, 2006) also says Rock Springs grew out of the Rehobeth Church meeting, though it places Rehobeth in Lincoln County. That is not a contradiction. Catawba County was carved out of Lincoln in 1842, so in Asbury’s day Terrell was in Lincoln County.

After the Civil War, Black Methodists built a camp-meeting tradition of their own nearby. The county survey records that A.M.E. congregations founded the Mott’s Grove Campground in 1870, about a mile and a half north of Terrell, with a plan loosely modeled on Balls Creek. The Terrell nomination says the land was donated by Dr. John J. Mott. Mott’s Grove United Methodist Church still stands on Sherrills Ford Road. In 2006 the old Rehobeth parsonage was moved about a mile to the Mott’s Grove church grounds, according to a 2014 State Historic Preservation Office review.

Connors, Gabriels and the Crossroads Economy

The nomination names Major Henry William Connor (1793–1866) as the area’s leading antebellum figure. He was a planter near Sherrill’s Ford, served in Congress from 1821 to 1841, and later sat in the state senate for Catawba County. NCpedia says he is buried in the Rehoboth Methodist cemetery. His house was moved in 1964 to save it from the rising lake, according to the county survey.

Commerce at the crossroads began after the war. The nomination dates the first business to Miles Whitfield Sherrill’s cotton gin, around 1869. Connor’s grandson, Thomas Franklin Connor (1860–1947), opened a general store in 1885. The nomination also mentions a tradition that it began in 1883. Around 1891 he built the two-story frame store with a false front that still anchors the district. In 1893 a post office opened inside the store, when Terrell had about twenty-five residents. The post office wing kept its paneled wall and postmaster’s window. Connor’s 1886 house, a Stick style design by Charles H. Lester, the county’s first known architect, stands nearby.

The next family to shape Terrell was the Gabriels. R. E. Gabriel acquired the Coleman-Caldwell-Gabriel farm in 1914. That two-story Greek Revival-influenced farmhouse is thought to have been built by Dr. Littleton T. Coleman after he bought the land in 1854. Gabriel also built a gristmill and ran the cotton gin. When lightning burned the gin in 1932, he rebuilt it with Lummus machinery. His son Harold Gabriel bought the store in 1933 and ran it and the post office until 1968. The gin stayed in business until 1960. The nomination says that was the year the boll weevil ended cotton growing in the county. In the twentieth century the crossroads itself was rearranged: NC 150 was cut through around 1930, and an older road near the Jason Sherrill House was closed.

“the best remaining example of a crossroads community of this period in Catawba County” — Terrell Historic District National Register nomination (NC State Historic Preservation Office)

The Terrell Historic District

The Terrell Historic District was listed on the National Register on July 15, 1986 (reference 86001685), according to the county’s NRHP list. It recognized fifteen inventoried properties clustered at the intersection: the Connor Store and Post Office, the Coleman-Caldwell-Gabriel farm, the Sherrill-Gabriel House (early 1880s, remodeled 1906), the T. F. Connor House, the James Gillin (1908) and Walter Gabriel (about 1902) houses, the Jason Sherrill House, the gin and mill complex, and Rehobeth’s church, cemetery and parsonage. By 1986 the 1889 frame church had been brick-veneered, and only a simplified spire survives from the original. The cemetery holds several hundred markers, some from the early nineteenth century. The district was listed under Criterion A, for postbellum farm and trade history; Criterion B, for Connor, Coleman, Gabriel and the Sherrills; and Criterion C, because the nomination considered it the county’s most intact crossroads community.

The district has lost pieces since then. When NCDOT studied widening NC 150 in 2013–2014, its consultants found that the gristmill, the Gabriel cotton gin and the cotton storage building were gone, apparently demolished after 2004. The consultants recommended shrinking the district. The State Historic Preservation Office pushed back in a May 12, 2014 memo, arguing that the Gillin and Walter Gabriel houses, the Howard house, the cotton warehouse and the Rehobeth church complex should stay in the district. The survey judged the Connor Store unaltered and still contributing. The county’s 2014 Highway 150 Corridor Plan looked at routing the widening around the district and recommended keeping the road on its existing route through it.

The store’s own future became uncertain. In August 2019 WSOC-TV reported that the land under the Terrell Country Store had been sold to a developer and the operators told to leave within a month. Hundreds of people signed a petition to save it. A county spokesperson said commissioners could not step in because the National Register listing is honorary. Wikipedia states that the store was removed in 2020, but this guide could not confirm that in a primary source. Check the building’s status before you plan a visit around it.

The Lake on Three Sides

Duke Power’s Cowans Ford Dam was completed in 1963, and its lake now surrounds Terrell on three sides, the nomination observes. Brick ranch houses and a furniture store went up at the crossroads in the early 1960s. The lake also brought the dead of other communities here. Davidson College’s Under Lake Norman map records that two family cemeteries from the flood zone were reinterred at Rehobeth. The Flemming family cemetery came in 1960, with six graves dated 1814–1896. The Cornelius family cemetery came in 1961, with eight graves dated 1827–1886.

The lake’s largest neighbor is just north of the crossroads. Duke’s Marshall Steam Station, named for former Duke Power president E. C. Marshall, began commercial operation in 1965. Duke lists four units with a winter peak of 2,078 megawatts, which it says is enough for about two million homes. Published summaries date Units 1 and 2 to 1965–66 and Units 3 and 4 to 1969–70, and note that scrubbers were finished in 2007. Since 2021 natural gas can be co-fired with coal in all four units. The plant’s coal ash has drawn regulatory attention too, including a 2014 state approval for Duke to discharge ash into the lake while it repaired a leaking pipe.

The next chapter is already approved. In March 2024 Duke applied to build two 425-megawatt, hydrogen-capable gas turbines on about 20 acres of Marshall property, roughly a mile northeast of the coal units, the Charlotte Business Journal reported. The filing said the first two coal units would retire by the end of 2028 and the last two would run into the early 2030s. North Carolina regulators approved the plan in December 2024, according to POWER magazine.

Terrell Today and Places to See

For the Census, Terrell is part of the Lake Norman of Catawba CDP (8,658 residents in 2020), together with Sherrills Ford. Its mail still goes to ZIP 28682. The long-planned NC 150 widening got under way in February 2025. It covers about six miles from Greenwood Road in Terrell east to U.S. 21 in Mooresville and includes a new bridge over Lake Norman.

• Terrell Historic District, NC 150 at Sherrills Ford Road. The Connor Store and Post Office, the Sherrill-Gabriel and Coleman-Caldwell-Gabriel houses and the other buildings are privately owned, so view them from the road (nomination).
• Rehobeth United Methodist Church and cemetery, on NC 150 within the district. Daniel Asbury and Henry W. Connor are buried here, along with the relocated Flemming and Cornelius family graves. Visit respectfully, outside service times.
• Mott’s Grove United Methodist Church, on Sherrills Ford Road (SR 1848) north of the crossroads. It is near the site of the 1870 Mott’s Grove Campground, and the old Rehobeth parsonage was moved here in 2006.
• Sherrills Ford-Terrell Branch Library, 9154 Sherrills Ford Road. The Friends of the Library sponsor local-history panels.
• Marshall Steam Station, a working power plant whose public entrance is off NC 150 (photo). See it from the highway.

Sources

• NC State Historic Preservation Office, Terrell Historic District National Register nomination (CT0378)
• NC State Historic Preservation Office, review ER 12-2211: NC 150 (R-2307) historic architectural survey and HPO comments (2014)
• National Park Service, Historic and Architectural Resources of Catawba County (Multiple Property Documentation Form, 1989)
• National Register of Historic Places listings in Catawba County (listing dates)
• NCpedia, North Carolina Gazetteer: Terrell
• NCpedia, “Asbury, Daniel”
• NCpedia, “Connor, Henry William” (Daniel M. McFarland, 1979)
• NCpedia, “Camp Meetings” (Lynne S. Lepley, 2006)
• Rock Springs Camp Meeting, campground history
• Terrell, North Carolina (namesake identification, ZIP code)
• WSOC-TV, “Townspeople hope to save old country store” (August 29, 2019)
• Davidson College Archives & Special Collections, Under Lake Norman map
• Duke Energy, Marshall Steam Station
• Marshall Steam Station (unit dates, scrubbers, ash history)
• Charlotte Business Journal via Charlotte Regional Business Alliance, Duke’s Marshall gas-plant application (March 2024)
• POWER, “Officials Approve Duke Energy’s Plan to Replace Coal with Gas-Fired Units” (January 2025)
• Catawba County, Highway 150 Corridor Plan (adopted September 8, 2014)
• NCDOT, NC 150 widening press release (February 7, 2025)
• U.S. Census Bureau QuickFacts, Lake Norman of Catawba CDP
• Catawba County Library, Sherrills Ford-Terrell Branch history program listing