St. Peter’s Church traces its earliest history to congregations and class meetings which met on sites between Mountain Road on the south and Old Ridge Road (near the Ashland Berry Farm) on the north. Few records remain of these 18th and early 19th century Methodists. In the 1780s, Bishop Francis Asbury established what many historians believe to have been the first Sunday School in America, in the home of Thomas Crenshaw, on Mountain Road not far from the present site of St. Peter’s.
In 1850, remnants of the earlier congregations moved to property on Route 611 (now St. Peter’s Church Road), a scant ½ mile south of the present church. At first the congregation worshipped in an arbor of trees; Peter Massie, a charter member and trustee, built a white frame church by 1852. After its completion, the church was named St. Peter’s, partly for the fisherman-disciple and partly for the man who helped establish the congregation.
Until the 1950s St. Peter’s was one of several churches comprising the West Hanover Circuit, in which the pastor’s financial support and his services were shared among the circuit churches. The church built additions and made improvements periodically, including a separate, concrete block Sunday School building.
The one acre church site on Rt. 611 was too small for the growing congregation. In the 1960s, the church trustees purchased 15 acres on Rt. 33 and in 1966 the congregation built a new church.