Before there was a chapel, there were camp meetings. In the early 1850s, the Methodist Episcopal Church held outdoor revival gatherings in the Suisun Valley that lasted up to two weeks at a stretch. Entire families set up tents, brought their cows for fresh milk, and spent their days in worship and fellowship under the California oaks. By 1855, the gatherings had grown large enough that a permanent structure seemed justified. The county's presiding elder, Reverend Bailey, proposed the idea at that year's meeting, and the congregation raised $5,000 — a serious sum for frontier settlers. Landy Alford donated the land, along with space for an adjoining cemetery. Construction began in the fall of 1856, using local stone and volunteer labor. The chapel was in use by Christmas of that year and formally dedicated in February 1857.

The chapel's first crisis arrived not from weather or neglect but from the deepest fracture in American life. By the early 1860s, the congregation was bitterly divided over slavery — the church had been organized under the Methodist Episcopal Church South, and not every member shared its sympathies. On Christmas Eve 1863, the Northern faction walked out to form their own congregation, a split that mirrored the war raging thousands of miles to the east. The remaining congregation never fully recovered. Attendance declined steadily through the rest of the nineteenth century. The last resident pastor left in 1895. Services continued sporadically after that, but the building began its long slide into disrepair, the stone walls standing while the community that had raised them drifted away.

By 1929, the chapel had deteriorated so badly that the congregation deeded it to the County of Solano as a pioneer monument — an admission that the building had become more memorial than church. The timing could not have been worse. The Great Depression struck that same year, and restoration funds were nonexistent. For a decade, the stone chapel sat empty, its walls intact but its interior crumbling. Then the WPA arrived. In the spring of 1940, the federal Works Projects Administration completed a full renovation, preserving the pioneer landmark that private resources had failed to maintain. A plaque was mounted outside: "This Historic Monument Erected A.D. 1856 by Solano County Pioneers. Reconstructed by Federal Works Agency, Work Projects Administration A.D. 1940." The chapel had been saved by the same kind of collective effort that built it in the first place.

In October 1962, the chapel was designated California State Historical Landmark #779. But unlike many landmarks, it never became a museum piece. The local Church of Christ congregation uses it as their sanctuary, and the chapel continues to host weddings and funerals — the rituals of passage that have filled its stone walls since 1856. Around 2007, the Suisun Fairfield Rockville Cemetery District, which now owns the building, undertook another renovation. The windows were replaced, the floor sanded and refinished, and the pews — relics sized for the smaller stature of mid-nineteenth-century settlers — were replaced with slightly larger replicas. Mrs. Walter Scarlett once described the chapel as "a tiny rock-walled church among great brooding trees that spread green arms around it and raise still heads above it as though in wordless prayer." The trees have grown taller. The chapel remains.