The Methodist church in Ada grew out of the wish of the settlers of the 1860s and 1870s for a continuation of the religious services they had left in their former homes. Community members from the First Creek, Second Creek, and Spring Creek settlements met under a large shade tree at the homestead of Lige Grace and organized the first Sunday School in the area. The school was interdenominational and met intermittently. The church was organized in 1872 and continued to meet in the old stone school house until after the Santa Fe railroad came through and the town of Ada was moved to its present site. The first assigned pastor arrived in 1883. The church filed their first charter as a Methodist Episcopal church on August 10, 1886; the first parsonage was built the same year at a cost of $600; the first church building was erected in 1889 at a cost of $2,000. The women’s organizations were very active and often creative in their fundraising. First as the Ladies Aid and the Missionary Society, then as the Women’s Society of Christian Service, then as the United Methodist Women, the groups sewed items for bazaars, baked pies, printed cookbooks, sold magazine subscriptions, and served chicken dinners, waffle suppers, and soup meals; they sent money to drought victims, made quilts, sold extracts and metal sponges, sent cookies to the military, and sent young people to church camps. In the early 20th century, the women paid for the shingling and papering of the parsonage. The Ada church began sharing a pastor with the Minneapolis (Kan.) church in 1943. EDIT: Ada United Methodist Church was declared closed as of June 30, 2019. All undesignated memberships were transferred to  First United Methodist Church in Minneapolis, KS.

Note written by Sarah St. John