Race family, of Weardale

Anthony Race was one of the most active WM local preachers in Weardale in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His son, also Anthony Race, joined the PMs on their arrival in Weardale and from 1823 to 1828 was a PM itinerant. George Race (15 August 1810 - 11 December 1886), son of Anthony Jnr., a grocer and draper in the dale, was a leading PM layman in the North-East for half a century , and one of its most learned and scholarly preachers. He was responsible for the rebuilding of the Westgate PM chapel in 1871, where his memorial can still be seen. His son, George Race Jnr. (died 19 March 1911), a PM LP, architect and builder, designed a number of attractive PM chapels mainly in Co Durham and North Yorkshire including that at Westgate (1871) where the Races themselves worshipped. Other PM chapels for which the Races were responsible include Bourne, Middleton-in-Teesdale (1873), Toft Hill (1879), Allhallowgate, Ripon (1880-1), Market Place, Wolsingham (1885), Milton Street, West Hartlepool (1887, later incorporated in Grange Road PM), and Shotley Bridge (1895). Of these, only those at Hartlepool, Ripon and Shotley Bridge remain in use. A distinctive identifying feature of a Race chapel is the plaster, leaf-like moulding around the inside of the chapel windows.

Sources
  • PM Magazine, 1883 pp.155-60; 1892 pp.20-24
  • Joseph Ritson, The Romance of Primitive Methodism (1909) pp.182-84
  • W.M. Patterson, Northern Primitive Methodism (1909), pp.168-9.
  • David W. Bebbington, The Intellectual Attainments of Evangelical Nonconformity: a nineteenth-century case-study (Dr. Williams's Trust, 2014), pp.10-17

Occupations

See also

Entry written by: DCD and GEM
Category: Person
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