Hickory Grove Church (3)
Dr. Joe Sutton
EARLY WORSHIP
Before Hickory Grove Church was built in 1860, and decades before their congregation was established, Bucklesberry had no local church. The few options available were miles away and required long commutes. In his 1810 profile of the physical and social infrastructure of Lenoir County, former Kinston Commissioner John Washington (1767-1827) noted there were only a handful of organized churches at the time, which in his words included:
"Two sects of Baptists in this County (the United Baptist and free will or ana Baptist [sic., Anabaptist]) and Methodist which are the only sects that associate in worship....The United Baptist have two churches and also use the Court House as a place of worship. The anna Baptist have also two churches, and as to the Methodist they have no church but use the Court House regularly for Worship."
According to Baptist historian Frank M. Masters, Regular Baptists, which included Primitive Baptists, merged with Separate Baptists in North Carolina in the late 1700s to form United Baptists. Available records suggest the two United Baptist churches identified by Washington were Bear Creek Primitive Baptist Church and Southwest Creek Church. Established by 1756, Bear Creek Church was located several miles north of Moseley Hall (later, La Grange). Southwest Separate Baptist Church, organized by 1762, was located on the east side of Southwest Creek, a half-mile from the Jones County line.
The two Free Will Baptist or Anabaptist churches referenced by Washington were Wheat Swamp Church and Lousan Swamp Church. Located in the Institute Township, near present-day North Lenoir High School on Institute Road, Wheat Swamp Church was established before 1752. Lousan Swamp Church, also founded before 1752, was located in the Vance Township, about seven miles north of Kinston, near the southern side of Greene County.
The Free Will Baptists and Anabaptists were actually not equivalent sects, as indicated by Washington, nor did one morph into the other. Clarified by Dr. J. Matthew Pinson, Ed.D., "Free Will Baptist forebears, the General Baptists, arose in England in the early seventeenth century....They shared the Anabaptist aversion to sacramentalism and tended toward a biblicist view of ordinances."
When viewed in light of present-day church standards, seventeenth and eighteenth century churches were indisputably primitive. In his historical account of Lenoir County, Dr. William S. Powell, Litt.D. (1919-2015) referred to early church buildings as meeting houses, where "congregations met in private homes, barns, and brush arbors" (p. 70). Churchgoers sat on wooden benches for worship services, which usually lasted all day. Revival services were referred to as protracted meetings. Inordinately long services, coupled with travel time, required that carry-along meals be prepared in advance.
Next month's article will continue the discussion of early worship. With Christmas season fully underway, interested readers may enjoy a previously published Bucklesberry article titled "Christmas 1883" available at https://t.ly/TxXnJ.
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