History of the North Carolina Baptists

STATE HISTORIES HISTORY OF NORTH CAROLINA BAPTISTS by George Washington Paschal. Volume 2 HISTORY OF NORTH CAROLINA BAPTISTS GEORGE WASHINGTON PASCHAL VOLUME 2 PREFACE In 1926, the Baptist State Convention of North Carolina authorized the preparation and publication in as many volumes as necessary of a comprehensive history of North Carolina Baptists. In 1930 was published History of North Carolina Baptists, Volume I, 1633-1805. In that volume are prefatory statements intended to apply to the entire work, to which readers are referred and which are not repeated here. This volume is designed as a proper continuation of Volume I, which, as indicated, roughly brought the history of the Baptists of North Carolina down to about 1805, but which was related chiefly to the eastern half of the state. In the present volume, the chief concern is the development of Baptists in the western part of North Carolina where the settlements and development, civil and religious, were a half-century later than in the east. In this western portion religious history, and specifically Baptist history, was influenced by economic and political development, social customs, and the national heritages of the peoples, just as was religious history in the east. But it was slower. Perhaps nowhere do we have a better demonstration of the difference in religious and moral growth of the populations east and west than in the circular letters which were prepared for the associations. For that reason, and because they are a valuable repository of Baptist doctrines, some portion of this volume has been devoted to them and their history, which begins with the first Baptist association in America, the Philadelphia. We find provision for them in the constitutions of the North Carolina associations with the exception of Sandy Creek, which did not provide for their publication until 1805. Because of their historical value and their rarity we have reproduced in the appendix two early lists of Baptist churches in North Carolina. The first is that found in Morgan Edwards’ Materials; the second is from Asplund’s Baptist Register. It is hardly necessary to observe that much about the Baptists of North Carolina remains to be told, much essential to a full understanding of Baptist development in the state during the past century. Among the topics remaining to be discussed are the formation of certain associations and the discontinuance of others; the withdrawal of the Negro Baptists after 1865 to form churches and associations of their own; the development of interest in Sunday schools; the contribution of Baptists to educational progress in the state; orphanages; missions — state, foreign and associational; publications; the State Board and the Corresponding Secretaries; Ridgecrest; etc. Finally, I wish to acknowledge my great debt to the many historians who have preceded me. In instances where original records have been destroyed they have performed invaluable service in preserving data which have been incorporated into this story. Without their help a connected account of the Baptists in the section under consideration would have been impossible. GEORGE W. PASCHAL Wake, Forest, N.C. October, 1955 DEDICATION This volume is affectionately dedicated to my daughter CATHERINE CONTENTS 1. EARLY BAPTISTS IN WESTERN N.C. 2. EARLY BAPTISTS IN WESTERN N.C. 3. BAPTISTS AND REGULATORS 4. TRYON’S WAR AGAINST THE BAPTISTS 5. TIMBER RIDGE 6. THE BRANCHES 7. DEEP CREEK 8. DUTCHMAN’S CREEK BAPTIST CHURCH 9. FLAT ROCK BAPTIST CHURCH 10. JERSEY SETTLEMENT 11. ABBOTT’S CREEK 12. ORGANIZATION OF CHURCHES 13. DISCIPLINE 14. YADKIN ASSOCIATION 15. DIVISIONS 16. JEFFERSON 17. OTHER ASSOCIATIONS 18. SOUTH AND WEST OF THE CATAWBA 19. SOUTH AND WEST OF THE CATAWBA — 2 20. BROAD RIVER BAPTIST ASSOCIATION 21. SYSTEM OF THE BROAD RIVER ASSOCIATION 22. REVIVAL 23. AFTER THE REVIVAL 24. BROAD RIVER 1807-1827 25. BROAD RIVER 1828-1851 26. FRENCH BROAD ASSOCIATION 27. BIG IVY ASSOCIATION 28. AFTER 1848 29. MINUTES 30. QUERIES 31. CIRCULAR LETTERS 32. CIRCULAR LETTERS-CHOWAN 33. HUMPHREY POSEY AND THE CHEROKEE MISSION APPENDIX 1 — EARLY BAPTISTS IN WESTERN NORTH CAROLINA Our former account has been devoted for the most part to the story of the rise and progress of the Baptists of eastern North Carolina. In what follows it is my purpose to tell the equally interesting and no less important story of the like development of the Baptists in all other sections of the State, with the hope that I may be able to remove any just reason for the frequent complaint that our North Carolina Baptist historians have given no connected account of Baptist work except in the east. In beginning this second section it is well to repeat what I have already said: Baptists do not live to themselves nor labor to themselves. Their aims and attainments are modified by the social, political, educational, economic, occupational and religious condition of the people among whom they live. Accordingly, in a preliminary chapter or two I am giving some account of these things; though many of my statements do not directly concern Baptists, yet they do constitute a background necessary for a correct understanding of Baptist work in this section. By western North Carolina as used in this account is meant that part of the State west of a north-and-south line running near the eastern line of the present counties of Rockingham, Guilford and Randolph from the Virginia line to the South Carolina line, the southern portion of which formed the eastern line of Anson County when it was erected in 1750, while the northern portion of this line became the eastern boundary of Rowan County when it was cut off from Anson County in 1753. The east-and-west line between these two counties extended along what is now the northern boundaries of the counties of Moore, Montgomery, Stanly, Cabarrus and Mecklenburg, and indefinitely to the west, and to the east to the Atlantic Ocean, being the southern boundary line of the lands of Earl Granville. Thus this line divided western North Carolina in those early days into two distinct and separate parts, a southern and a northern, the Anson County section being outside the Granville Tract, and the Rowan section being within it. On this account their development was different, and that in the southern section earlier. This may be better understood from the following statement. Rowan County, as originally laid out in 1753, was the western part of Earl Granville’s Tract, which tract extended from the Virginia line south to the east-and-west line already described, and from the Atlantic to the Pacific, as sometimes claimed, certainly to the western boundary of North Carolina and beyond. It was assigned to Earl Granville as his one-eighth part of the magnificent domain of Carolina granted by King Charles II of England in the amended charter of 1665 to the Lords Proprietors, when in 1728 he, Earl Granville, refused to join with the seven other Lords Proprietors in selling their interests to the King. As one may see from a map of North Carolina, this Granville tract contained considerably more than half the land area of the present North Carolina, and included the early settlements of the east and much of the lands to the west best fitted for agriculture which, owing to their elevation, were relatively free from malaria and other diseases from which the settlers of the eastern part of the Province constantly suffered. However, the settlers in the east had the advantage of easy communication by water with the outside world, and the other colonies along the Atlantic seaboard north and south, and with England, and had greater facilities for trade and readier markets for their products, advantages which the settlers on the eastern part of the Granville Tract enjoyed. For these reasons, until about 1750, the expansion of population of North Carolina westward was very slow. In the year 1746, when the commissioners appointed to survey the Granville line reached Haw River, near the present town of Moncure, they left off because, as they reported, there were no settlers to the west from whom they might obtain supplies. In the same year Matthew Rowan reported that he had found not more than 100 men able to bear arms in all the Province west of a line running north and south near the site of the present city of Durham. In the next few years, however, the western expansion had begun and by 1753 the number of fighting men in this same territory had increased to 3,000.f1 In the earlier years nearly all this expansion to the west was in the region to the south of the Granville Tract due to the fact that owing to the negligence of Earl Granville no provision was made for sale to settlers of any of his lands in the west. For years after coming into possession of his Tract he maintained no office for the sale of his lands, and when he had appointed agents, according to Colonel William L. Saunders, “their extortions, exactions and oppressions were almost unendurable, causing the people to rise up more than once against them; these agents getting a fee for their services, sometimes induced two or more parties to make entries for the same pieces of land and engaged in other malpractices, which according to the report of the General Assembly of 1755 greatly retarded the settlement of that part of the Province of which his Lordship is proprietor’.”f2 It was in the region to the south of the Granville Tract, in Mecklenburg and Cabarrus counties of today, that the first important settlement in the western part of North Carolina was made.

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