Lost Chorlton Churches nu 2 .......... the Macpherson Memorial Primitive Church High Lane

I just missed the Primitive Methodist Church on High Lane.

It closed  two years before I came to Manchester in 1969, and had been demolished by the time I settled in Chorlton.

Now I have been interested in the place since I discovered James McPherson who was closely involved with the church since it was founded in 1896.

“The Primitive Methodist church was early 19th century secession from the Wesleyan Methodist church and was particularly successful in evangelising agricultural and industrial communities at open meetings. 

In 1932 the Primitive Methodists joined with the Wesleyan Methodists and the United Methodists to form the Methodist Church of Great Britain.”*

Mr Macpherson was an undertaker and lived next door at number 23 High Lane from 1901 and possibly earlier.

In 1894 this stretch of land was still open but it may well be that when the first church building went up in 1898 the McPherson family moved to the large ten roomed house beside the church.

Mr McPherson died in 1901 but his two daughters, Sophie and Jessie were still in the family home a decade later and show up on the census return sharing the house with three boarders.

Isabella Russell Kay was aged 80, and a widow, Mary Florence Jeffery, 35, was married and her daughter Mary Taylor Jeffrey was.  Mrs Jeffrey had married ten years but there is no indication of where her husband was on the night of the census.

Sophie died in 1912 and this may have been when her sister moved because she died five years later in Lancaster.

And that pretty much is all I know at present.

Their house is still there but only one of the church buildings survives.  This was the school built in 1896, which was enlarged in 1908 and is now the  "Manchester Centre for Buddhist Meditation."

The church stood to the left of the school and was opened in 1902, but declining numbers and the reorganisation of the Methodist Church in 1932 meant that it closed in 1967.

All that is left to do is some digginging into the rate books and directories and we may be able to pinpoint exactly when the family moved to Chorlton and when Jessie left for Lancaster.

Pictures; the Macpherson Memorial Primitive Church High Lane, circa 1920s from the Lloyd Collection and the school today from the collection of Andrew Simpson

*High Lane Primitive Methodist, Chorlton cum Hardy, http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/LAN/ChorltoncumHardy/HighLanePrimitiveMethodist.shtml