Location: Section 33, Township 9, Range 6

Directions: FROM BROOKHVEN: From the intersection of Hwy 550 and Hwy 51 in Brookhaven, go west on Hwy 550 for 6.8 miles. Turn right onto Jackson Liberty Road. Follow this road for 6.9 miles. Turn left onto Midway Road and go 2.1 miles. Turn left onto Mercy Seat Road and go 1.3 miles. Turn right on John I. Hay Road. The Old Sweetwater Cemetery is .1 of a mile a down this road. This cemetery is in Copiah County but within a couple miles of the Lincoln County line.

Directions: FROM PORT GIBSON: Turn left on Highway 547 in Port Gibson and go to John Hay Road, turn right on John Hay. It is 1/10 mile from where it intersects with Highway 550.

The Sweetwater United Methodist Church has two distinctions. It is the oldest Methodist congregation in Copiah County, Mississippi, and it had originally a charter from the legislature, granted by the fourteenth session of that body in November 1830. Only one other Methodist Church, namely the one at Port Gibson, still exists from a number chartered by the state.

Sweetwater Church was organized in 1824, when John Ira Ellis Byrd and Lewellen Leggett were pastors of the Claiborne Circuit. William Winans was then presiding elder of the Mississippi District. The first building was constructed of logs on the site of what is still known as Sweetwater Cemetery on the road from Barlow to Caseyville, a few miles from State Highway 20. The old Sweetwater Cemetery is on John Hay Road in Copiah County. For thirty years, Sweetwater Church stood on this spot and served as the mother church of Methodism in southwestern Copiah and adjoining counties.

In the early 1850s, the log church was abandoned, and a new frame church was erected just across the Homochitto River in Lincoln County, 3.5 miles from the present community of Caseyville. The church remained there for more than thirty years.

By 1884, the members decided to move back to Copiah County in the community called Peetsville where a school had been established in 1883. They met in a school building until a church was built in 1887.