The return from the Primitive Methodist society in Verwood to the 1851 Census of Places of Public Religious worship showed that they were meeting in a chapel built in 1840. The return was completed by the manager, William Bendal.
25 people attended the morning service and 50 people attended the afternoon service.
Verwood village website reports that Verwood Methodist Church active in 2021 was using a building on Vicarage Road built in 1909 to replace an earlier 1876 Primitive Methodist Chapel on the same site.
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I think the identification of the Primitive chapel with the one in Vicarage Road is a mistake. The only place I have found the identification is on http://www.verwoodhistorical.org/Local_History/V_churches.htm as follows: Verwood Methodist Church in Vicarage Road was built in 1909 to replace an earlier 1876 Primitive Methodist Chapel on the same site.
This did get picked up too in articles in Dorset Life magazine in August 2008 and February 2019.
The following website has a different version when it recorded the centenary of the Vicarage Road building https://verwood.org/methodist_church.htm : There are references to Methodism in Verwood from the mid 19th century. The present site was obtained in 1908 and the foundation stone laid on the 26th May 1909 and the first service in the Church being in November 1909. The year 2009 therefore is the centenary of Methodist Worship in this place. – The article also says: There was a Methodist Society meeting in Verwood from some time after the middle of the last Century, but records are so scarce that no exact dates can be found. Reference has been found to a mud and wood building with eighty free seats, but in 1901 there was said to be fifty seats available for letting and thirty set apart for children, at “an overlap of fifteen inches each”. The same record states that the Wesleyan Chapel be continued from 1865. – There is a lot more.
The 1940 list of Methodist buildings records only a Wesleyan chapel in Verwood.
The 1851 census entry has been transcribed in this website https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C17375678 as Lake Chapel. There is a Lake Road in Verwood; might this give a clue?
I have recently looked at the exterior of the chapel and taken some photos. In due course I will post a page on https://www.mywesleyanmethodists.org.uk/content/category/chapels
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