Its interior was configured according to the Akron plan, a scheme for laying out Sunday-school rooms that was in widespread use through much of the final third of the 19th century.

Because of its exterior and interior design, it was listed in the National Register of Historic Places, under the name First United Presbyterian Church.

[2] In May 1867, the Barnes party returned north with a herd of cattle and two wagons, whose cargo included building materials for a frame house, and settled near the junction of Union and Taylor Creeks.

Only the church's west wall survived; on it, an American flag that had been hung for a memorial service for the recently deceased James Garfield remained undamaged.

The new church's cornerstone was laid on November 18, 1913; while it was under construction, services were held in the lodge hall on the second floor of Hein's Opera House.

Built at a cost of $26,000, the new church was dedicated on June 14, 1914,[7] with a capacity of 200 people in the sanctuary, which could be expanded to 350 by opening the adjoining Sunday-school rooms.

[18] By 2007, the congregation had declined to nine members, four of them living in nursing homes; they concluded that they could no longer afford to maintain the church building, and held the final service in May 2007.

[19][20][21][22] The Madison church was designed according to the Akron Plan, an architectural scheme that was used widely in Sunday-school buildings in the United States between the late 1860s and the mid-1910s.

At the end of the session, the superintendent led, and the whole body participated in, a five-minute review of the lesson followed by closing exercises.

[26] This created a challenge for ecclesiastical architects: the Sunday-school building had to be designed in such a way that the pupils could quickly and efficiently be separated into various grades, and brought together for all-school activities.

[28][29] When the First Methodist Episcopal Church in Akron decided to construct a new building, Miller worked with several architects to plan the Sunday-school wing.

He devised a plan in which wedge-shaped classrooms were separated by partitions radiating from the direction of a central superintendent's platform.

Doors on the platform-facing side of each classroom could be closed during grade-separated lessons, or opened to allow all pupils to see and hear the superintendent during school-wide exercises.

This did away with the chief advantage of the Akron Plan, whose awkwardly shaped, imperfectly soundproofed, and often poorly lighted rooms were not well suited for any other use.

[40] As a representative of this style, and because its interior serves as a well-preserved example of Akron plan design, the church was listed in the National Register of Historic Places in 2008.

Two low square towers stand at the northeast and southeast corners of the building; on the east side of each, a flight of concrete steps leads to an entrance, one to the pastor's study and one to the sanctuary.

Smaller round-headed windows occur on the east and west sides of the bell tower, at about the same level as the south entrance.

On the south side of the bell tower, above the doorway, is a pair of diamond-shaped windows set in a raised rectangle of light-tan brick; on the east and west sides, at the same level, are similar arrangements, but with diamond-shaped decorations of corbelled light-tan brick instead of windows.

The roof of the polygonal Sunday-school section slopes upward, then gives way to short vertical walls defining a kind of cupola, also with clerestory windows.

[42] The principal entrance, on the south side of the belltower, leads to a small vestibule from which short flights of stairs rise to the sanctuary level and descend to the basement.