Sumter County, Alabama, Religious Rituals

Topic: Early Versions
Rituals for baptisms and death are the African-American religious rites of passage best known to outsiders.  After the Civil War, Walter Fleming wrote in Alabama:

“Baptizings were as popular as the opera among the whites to-day.  That ceremony took place at the river or creek side.  Thousands were sometimes assembled, and the air was electric with emotion.  The negro was then as near Paradise as he ever came in his life.  The Baptist ceremony of immersion was preferred, because, as one of them remarked, ‘It looks more the business.’  Shouting they went into the water and shouting they came out.” [1]

In Sumter County, Oliver Bell remembered “us got baptized in the river back of Horn’s Bridge, but that wasn’t till after the Surrender.” [2]

Margaret Washington connected baptisms among Gullah-speakers in South Carolina with Mende initiation rituals. [3]  The Julia Tutwiler Library has photographs of one on the banks of the Tombigbee that match those described by Washington.  In one picture, five men, dressed in white, are standing in the water with a pastor clothed in black.  In another, a large group is assembled on the bank.  Most are wearing white.  The skirt styles and hem lengths suggest the photo was taken just before or after World War I. [4]

Most descriptions of Sumter County baptisms, however, are as simple as Bell’s.  Amy Chapman told Ruby Pickens Tartt: “I was baptized in Jones Creek, and Dr. Edmonds, a white preacher, joined me to the Jones Creek Baptist church long before the war.” [5]

Similarly, Lewis Brown told Charles Octavius Boothe, he “was baptized by a Mr. Edmonds into the fellowship of the Jones’ Creek Church.” [6]

Alma Edwards Towns was born in 1919.  She told an interviewer in 2011: “I was baptized by Reverend L. S. Partridge from Demopolis, Alabama in the Jim Matthews pond in Coatopa, Alabama.” [7]

These people remember two things: the body of water, and the name of the person who did the initiation.  These perfunctory comments might suggest the long-lasting fear of white vigilantes who disrupt public ceremonies, [8] but I suspect they indicate a different cultural heritage than that of the Mende.

As mentioned in the posts for 8 September 2019, many of the slaves in Sumter County came from Igbo areas of modern-day Nigeria through Virginia and North Carolina.  Their most important initiation ceremony occurs soon after birth when the parents seek the identity of the ancestor who has been reincarnated in their child. [9]

Chapman may have been alluding to this ritual when she told Ruby Pickens Tartt “I would admire to stay on a little longer.  There is a baby comin on the Johnson place soon, and don’t nobody know about the signs like I do.” [10]  Her mother came from Petersburg, Virginia, and her father from Richmond, Virginia. [11]

Igbo traditions also may have influenced funereal traditions.  Richard Henderson says Igbo mortuary ceremonies involve two stages: “burial and lamentation.” [12]  In 1866, a Clarke County, Alabama, newspaper reported “black preachers travel about and preach funerals of persons who died many years ago.” [13]  In the 1930s, Tartt noted:

“Among the Negro people of Sumter County the actual internment is referred to as the ‘burying.’  The funeral is preached later on a Sunday chosen by the family, sometimes after a year has elapsed.” [14]

This was an easy tradition for Igbo to perpetuate on Southern plantations where sacred time was limited during certain seasons of the agricultural cycle.  Angie Garrett remembered “If any us died in them days, buried us quick as they could and got out there and got to work.” [15]

More important, Henderson said the the postponed part of the Igbo ritual occurs during the dry season after the harvest is complete. [16]  Ida Gayle said at the Black Bluff Missionary Baptist Church near Whitfield “the fourth Sunday of each July was the beginning of two-week revival services.  On this day funerals would be preached for all members who had died during the previous twelve months.  When a member died, they were buried the same day.” [17]

Tom Moore’s son was killed by a careless driver in the late 1930s.  He told Tartt “it all happened on Saturday and us had to hurry and get the grave dug and bury Jerry before dust on Sunday ’cause we knowed it naturally won’t do to carry him over in the house on Sunday or some of the rest would be gone before this year is up.” [18]

Moore indicates burials were done quickly to lay spirits to rest.  Among the Igbo, Henderson said “when a person dies, the elemental ghostly components of the personal god ordinarily return to the land of the dead, whence they may be born again through a compact with another personal god.” [19]  They are key to maintaining the cycle of reincarnation that is part of the post-natal rituals.

Henderson noted things are more serious when a “bad death” occurs, that is one that doesn’t have a natural cause.  Then, “the ghostly components become attached to the shrine of that spirit and are not reincarnated but remain dangerous to the living.” [20]

When Stephen Renfroe killed Frank Sledge and Caesar Davis in 1869, [21] Oliver Bell remembered the freedmen “went down there that night and got them, and they buried” them. [22]

Tartt attended AmyChapman’s burial in 1938. [23]  She said that after the grave was filled and a mound had been shaped over it, saplings were “placed in the soft earth at its head and foot to mark it.”  Then, “each worker rested his spade against the mound’s side, iron point in the earth and handle pointing toward the sky.” [24]

Next, the preacher asked for flowers.  Following the protocols of white supremacy still governing social relations, Tartt went first “with my bowl of zinnias.”  When the others followed, they “made small hollows in the earth in which they placed their bouquets so that they stood upright.” [25]

When she later asked Chapman’s family about the shovels, they brushed Tartt off with “it is custom.” [26]  The saplings that Tartt took for granted may have come from the Kongo who planted trees on graves as “a sign of spirit, on its way to the other world.” [27]

Chapman was “buried on the plantation where she was born.”  The grave was “beside her Aunt Mary’s and near her sister’s.  A few steps down the hillside were other, unmarked graves, members of her family who had gone before.” [28]

Separate African-American cemeteries with headstones don’t appear in Sumter County until the 1890s [29] when a cash economy had been introduced around Cuba, and individuals and groups could accumulate money to buy land for churches. [30]

That did not mean individuals didn’t know where their parents and grandparents were buried.  It may be the reason people returned to their old masters after the war. [31]  The fact whites believed some freedmen were being loyal or rewarding good people may have been a convenient fiction to which Blacks acquiesced to protect what was sacred to them.

In the late 1930s, Oliver Bell remembered they buried Sledge and Frank “up there in the old Travis graveyard right there on that place.  My mammy and daddy buried there too.” [27]

People carried a map of the unseen in their heads.

End Notes
1.  Walter L. Fleming.  Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama.  New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905.  273.  His sources were Huntsville newspapers, denomination histories, and “conversations with various negroes and whites.”

2.  Oliver Bell.  “That Tree Was My Nurse.”  Transcribed by Ruby Higgins Tartt for the WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from Alabama. [33]  134–137 in Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens.  Toting the Lead Row.  University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981.  134.  Owens modernized Tartt’s transcriptions to make them easier to read. [34]

3.  Margaret Washington Creel.  “A Peculiar People.”  New York: New York University Press, 1988.  293–295.

4.  M. J. Turpentine.  “Negro Baptising ‘Big B’ river, Gainesville, Ala.” and another unlabeled photograph.  Julia Tutwiler Library, University of West Alabama.  Reprinted by Alan Brown.  Sumter County.  Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2015.  29.

5.  Amy Chapman.  “The Masters Good but Overseers Mean.”  Transcribed by Tartt.  128–129 in Brown and Owens.  129.  I’ve found nothing about Edmonds.

6.  Charles Octavius Boothe.  The Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama.  Birmingham: Alabama Publishing Company, 1895.  117.

7.  Alma Edwards Towns.  Interviewed by Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine in Demopolis, Alabama, on 22 July 2011.  23–25 in Back Then.  Edited by Tammy Jackson Montgomery and DeLaine.  University of Western Alabama website.  24.  Jno. Matthews owned 152 slaves in Sumter County in 1860. [35]

8.  The post for 6 September 2020 has a description of an African-American frolic being disrupted by a man “with a white sheet round him.”

9.   Igbo initiation into adulthood is an individual affair that is a prerequisite for marriage. [36]

10.  Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Amy Chapman’s Funeral.”  79–83 in Brown and Owens.  79–80.  Tartt simply noted: “the superstitions connected with a baby’s birth were important to Amy.” [37]

11.  Chapman.  128.

12.  Richard N. Henderson.  The King in Every Man.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.  400.  The Igbo source also is mentioned by Newbell Niles Puckett. [38]

13.  Clarke County Journal.  18 October 1866.  Cited by Peter Kolchin.  First Freedom. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972.  118.

14.  Tartt, Funeral.  81.

15.  Angie Garrett.  “Turned Lose without Nothin.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  140–142 in Brown and Owens.  141.

16.  Henderson.  385.

17.  Ida Gayle.  “Black Bluff Missionary Baptist Church.”  1982.  Jud K. Arrington collection, Tutwiler Library.  44 in The Heritage of Sumter County, Alabama.  Edited by Charles Walker.  Clayton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 2005.

18.  Tom Moore.  “Tom Moore and His Death Money.”  Transcribed by Tart.  77–79 in Brown and Owens.  78.

19.  Henderson.  122.
20.  Henderson.  122.
21.  The deaths of Sledge and Davis are described in the post for 13 September 2020.
22.  Bell.  135.

23.  Brown and Owens.  “Appendix: Biographies of Sumter County Singers and Storytellers.”  156.

24.  Tartt, Funeral.  82.
25.  Tartt, Funeral.  82–83.

26.  Tartt, Funeral.  82.  In Columbus, Mississippi, to the northwest of Sumter County, Puckett was told “the tools used in digging a grave are left on the site for a day or so after burial. [39]  In Calhoun, Alabama, they were “laid across the grave.” [40]

27.  Fu-Kiau Bunseki.  Interview, 9 October 1977.  Quoted by Robert Faris Thompson.  Flash of the Spirit.  New York: Vintage Books, 1984.  139.  Bunseki was the Belgian Congo-born scholar who articulated the Kongo cosmology. [41]

28.  Tartt, Funeral.  81.

29.  The earliest date for an African-American cemetery in a list published by The University of Alabama, is 1890 in the Jones Creek Baptist Church. [42]  Jenkins seemed to think few white graves had headstones because of the difficulty of transporting them by steamer and dirt road. [43]  This overlooks the fact part of the county was limestone bluffs.  The raw material was present, but apparently no settler had the skills to make headstones or to train slaves to do the work.  This probably was a consequence of the county’s hostility to skilled tradesmen, especially those from Europe.

30.  The economic renaissance in southwestern Sumter County is discussed in the post for 20 September 2020.

31.  Gwendolyn Midlo Hall believed Igbo women where especially attached “to the land where their first child was born.” [44]

32.  Bell.  135.  The Travis cemetery was a white family graveyard begun for Enoch Travis, who died in 1841.  Travis’ daughter married Ed Bell. [45]  It’s also known as the Bells Cemetery. [46]

33.  For more information on Tartt and the WPA Slave Narratives project, see the post for 23 January 2019.

34.  Laurella Owens.  “Introduction.”  59–60 in Brown and Owens.  60.

35.  Tom Blake.  “Sumter County, Alabama: Largest Slaveholders from 1860 Slave Census Schedules and Surname Matches for African Americans on 1870 Census.”  Ancestry website.

36.  Vincent De Paul U. Mbah.  “Igbo Child Initiation and Christian Baptism: A Case Study in Inculturation.”  PhD dissertation.  Universidad De Navarra, 1993.

37.  Tartt, Funeral.  80.

38.  Newbell Niles Puckett.  Folk Beliefs of the Southern Negro.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1926.  91.  His source was Arthur Glyn Leonard.  The Lower Niger and Its Tribes.  London: Macmillan and Company, 1906.  154.

39.  Puckett.  94–95.  His source was Rena Franks.
40.  Puckett.  95.  His source was Qeither Y. Stanfield.

41.  Wyatt MacGaffey.  “Constructing a Kongo Identity: Scholarship and Mythopoesis.”  Comparative Studies in Society and History 58:159–180:2016.  165.

42.  List of Sumter County Cemeteries.  The University of Alabama, Department of Geography Alabama Maps website.

43.  Jenkins.  164–165.

44.  Gwendolyn Midlo Hall.  Slavery and African Ethnicities in the Americas.  Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005.  142.

45.  Jenkins.  165.
46.  University of Alabama.

Sumter County, Alabama, Religious Forms

Topic: Early Versions
The lexical history of Sumter County, Alabama, slave communities differed from that in the Georgia and South Carolina sea islands.  In places like Saint Helena, plantations had imported manpower from Africa before the close of the Atlantic slave trade, and kept groups isolated from one another.  During the Civil War, William Francis Allen noted:

“the different plantations have their own peculiarities, and adepts profess to be able to determine by speech of a negro what part of the island he belongs to, or even, in some cases, his plantation.  I can myself vouch for the marked peculiarities of one plantation from which I had scholars, and which are hardly more than a mile distant from another which lacked these peculiarities.” [1]

All but seven slaves in Sumter County in 1850 were born in this country. [2]  As indicated in the post for 8 September 2019, ancestors of the ones interviewed by Ruby Pickens Tartt in the 1930s, had come from Virginia and North Carolina.  Over generations, a regional vocabulary developed that attached African concepts to English words.

Homogenization accelerated when people moved about after Emancipation.  By the time people were talking to Tartt, they had common terms for describing their secret meetings with iron pots described in the post for 22 September 2019.  They either shouted or prayed easy, depending on the situation.

There was no agreement on the location of these meetings.  Margaret Washington said in South Carolina in the 1840s, Baptist slave owners began setting aside buildings for religious use to “deprive the inhabitants of various plantations of an opportunity to mingle.” [3]

Whites knew these as Praise Houses, but Samuel Lawton found local Gullah speakers really were saying “Prays.” [4]  Washington observed Gullahs were adept at double meanings, [5] which allowed simultaneous communication with whites and among themselves.

No term existed in Sumter County.  Josh Horn said his master, Isaac Horn, provided “an old house with a dirt floor in the quarters.” [6]  George Young implied slaves on Reuben Chapman’s plantations appropriated an “old house with a dirt floor.” [7]  Oliver Bell simply said they “shut the door” on Tresvan De Graffenreid’s place. [8]

Freedmen agreed they were Baptists after the war, but, beyond full-immersion baptism by adults, that term had little meaning.  As mentioned in the posts for 19 January 2020 and 26 January 2020, Baptists in Pamlico County, North Carolina, continually were confronted by proselytizing groups bent of changing their ways.  This continued in Sumter County, where Bethany Baptist church split in 1838 between Missionary and Old Side groups. [9]

When one looks beyond dogma, which was of little interest to most slaves and whites, the primary difference between factions was their view on what constituted qualification for membership and ordination.  Anabaptists, General Baptists, Free Will Baptists, and Primitive Baptists all believed a religious experiences was sufficient.  Particular Baptists and Missionary Baptists were more influenced by Calvin, and believed an individual needed to recognize his or her own depravity and that ministers should have some training.

Individuals who talked to Tartt had had owners from a variety of family traditions.  De Graffenreid’s great-grandfather founded the Anabaptist colony in New Berne, North Carolina. [10]  Jim Godfrey, the owner of Lucindia Williams, [11] was a Methodist from South Carolina. [12]  His aunts were married to John Evander Brown and George A. Brown, [13] whose early ancestors moved from Rhode Island to a Baptist colony in New Jersey. [14]

Ancestors of the owners of Berry Smith and Josh Horn had contacts with Quakers.  James Harper’s great-grandfather [15] lived in Friend’s communities in the Carolinas and Georgia, [16]  while one  of Isaac Horn’s father’s [17] brothers joined the Quakers in Edgecombe, North Carolina. [18]

Many who moved to Edgecombe County were fleeing religious persecution in Virginia. [19]  Another of Horn’s father’s relatives was a founding member of the Kehukee Baptist Association [20] formed by General Baptists.  Isaac’s father’s brother, his uncle Josiah, [21] helped organize the Methodist Protestant Church in Panola with Quakers and Primitive Baptists from that same part of Edgecombe County. [22]

Descendants’ religious affiliations may have changed and their public theology probably evolved to fit that of their neighbors in Sumter County.  What may not have changed were attitudes and values passed on through early child rearing practices.  Godfrey’s father’s will stipulated:

“it is my will that in the event any of the negroes be dissatisfied or unwilling to go to or live or serve any of my heirs to which they may fall in the division, it is my will my executioners shall swap exchange or sell to some other person or persons to whom the dissatisfied slave may be willing to live with.” [23]

No one has left a record of Freedmen’s actions in the first year of Emancipation in Sumter County.  In the pine woods of Clarke County south of Marengo County, a local newspaper complained that preachers were “springing up among them . . . without ordination, and claiming to receive their ministerial commissions and Biblical information directly from the mouth of God.” [24]

The following year brush arbors were reported.  There was no shared agreement on this term in Sumter County.  While most used “bush arbor,” some contributors to The Heritage of Sumter County in 2005 used the term “brush harbor.”  Mary Jo Square wrote “bush hobbler (meaning tent).” [25]

It probably began as a white term coming from Phoebe Palmer’s Holiness Movement that spread after 1867, [26] and was used by Freedmen to camouflage an African-American event with a label soothing to outsiders.  One suspects the retreat into the country provided a means of perpetuating what remnants of older African initiation rituals had survived.

Not all Freedmen wished to continue antebellum practices.  Many wanted “to do what was ‘right’ and behave as they thought free men did.” [27]  In Sumter County they were affected most by Jeremiah Brown and Abner Scarborough.  Brown’s father had been an English Baptist pastor in Darlington, South Carolina. [28]  Scarborough’s father was converted in 1811 [29] in Edgecombe County. [30]

Both were in the Missionary Baptist tradition, which emphasized centralized organizations that defined theology.  Brown donated to the Baptist seminary in Marion, Alabama. [30]  Scarborough was active in the Bigbee Baptist Association [32] in Sumter and Greene counties that was founded in 1853. [33]

One Freedman they influenced was Lewis Brown.  He was from Saint Louis, and had been purchased by Jeremiah in 1845.  Lewis was baptized in Jones Creek Church in 1863 where, Charles Octavius Boothe said, “the chief persons in the presbtery were Revs. Abner Scarber (white) and Mr. Wright.” [34]

Nathan Ashby organized the Colored Missionary Convention of the State of Alabama as a parallel organization [35] to the white Alabama Baptist Association in 1868.  That same year the regional Bethlehem Association was formed “in association with Jones Creek” to mirror the Bigbee conference. [36]

Like Daniel Payne, who tried to suppress ring shouts in the AME church, [37] Ashby sought to spread “correct gospel knowledge and influence” and elevate the “standard of ministerial education, piety and usefulness.” [38]  Boothe, head of a church in Montgomery, [39] condemned local Baptist ministers for acting on “dreams and suggestions which, they say, are made to them by ‘the spirit’.” [40]

Lewis was newly ordained [41] when Jones Creek hosted the founding meeting of the Bethlehem association.  By 1895, it had 6,000 members in 37 congregations, and sent more students to the church’s seminary in Selma “than any other association in the state.” [42]

Scarborough’s last pastorate was New Prospect Missionary Baptist, where he moved after he bought a plantation in the area in 1866. [43]  The year before he died, [44] white membership had dwindled, and ownership was turned over to African-American members. [45]

Tartt talked with three individuals about this church.  Tom Moore said his wife belonged to “the Prospect Baptist Missionary, and she just sets and prays and sings.” [46]  Laura Clark lived “across the road from that church over yonder and can’t go ’cause I’s crippled and blind.  But I hears them singin.” [47]  Emma Crocket told Tartt “I goes now to de New Prophet Church, and my favorite song” has the line “move Daniel, rock me home Daniel, rock by faith Daniel.” [48]

The white form was Missionary Baptist, but the African-American substance was much older.

End Notes
1.  William Francis Allen.  “Introduction.”  The Slave Songs of the United States.  Edited by Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison.  New York: A. Simpson and Company, 1867.  xxiv.

2.  Nelle Morris Jenkins.  Pioneer Families of Sumter County, Alabama.  Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Willo Publishing Company, 1961.  Reprinted by Bloutsville, Alabama: The Yarbrough National Genealogical and Historical Association, 14 June 2015.  128.  Most were on one plantation owned by “Poole who bought them from a man by the name of Jones in North Carolina.”

3.  Margaret Washington Creel.  “A Peculiar People.”  New York: New York University Press, 1988.  233 and 277.  Quotation, 277.

4.  Samuel Lawton.  “The Religious Life of Coastal and Sea Island Negroes.”  PhD dissertation.  George Peabody College for Teachers, 1939.  54–56.  Cited by Washington.  391, note 44.

5.  Washington.  391, note 44.  “The Gullahs’ mastering of double meaning however may also inform the discussion.  They often asked white Northerners to ‘jine praise wid we.’ [. . .]  Thus the Gullahs went to the meetinghouse to praise and pray.”

6.  Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Alice.”  Southwest Review 34:192–195:1949.  Reprinted by Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens.  Toting the Lead Row.  University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981.  103.  Her source was Josh Horn.  A fuller quotation appears in the post for 22 September 2020.

7.  George Young.  “Peter Had No Keys ’ceptin His.”  Transcribed by Tartt for the WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from Alabama. [49]  120–122 in Brown and Owens.  121.  Owens modernized Tartt’s transcriptions to make them easier to read. [50]  A fuller quotation appears in the post for 22 September 2019.

8.  Oliver Bell.  “That Tree Was My Nurse.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  134–137 in Brown and Owens.  134.

9.  Jenkins.  38.

10.  Bell.  134.  For more on the founding of New Bern, see the post for 19 January 2020.

11.  Lucindia Washington.  Collected by Alice S. Barton for the WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from Alabama.  Reprinted by Alan Brown and David Taylor as “A Slave Story.”  99–102 in  Gabr’l Blow Sof’.  Livingston, Alabama: Livingston Press, 1997.  101–102.

12.  James Godfrey was buried in the Sumterville Methodist Church’s cemetery. [51]

13.  Robert D. Spratt.  A History of the Town of Livingston, Alabama.  Edited by Nathaniel Reed.  Livingston: University of West Alabama, 1997.  24.

14.  The line was Nicolas > Abraham > Abraham > John > Samuel > John Evander.  Jenkins identified John Evander’s grandfather. [52]  The Cummings Family provided the rest of the genealogy. [53]

15.  James M. Allen, Jr., identified Harper’s parents as Robert Harper and Mary Dunlap in “James Allen of Scotland and Virginia: A Partial List of His Descendants.”  11 January 2007.  North Carolina Digital Collections website.

16.  House of Harper Genealogy.  “Robert Harper Sr. of Georgia.”  Genealogy and History Blog.  5 May 2017.  “By 1774 Robert Harper, Sr., was in Georgia, in the neighborhood of the Quaker settlement at Wrightsborough, St. Paul’s Parish (now McDuffie County) [. . .] Records show that Robert Harper, Sr. had previously lived near Quaker settlements in North Carolina and South Carolina.”

17.  Isaac’s line was William > Jacob > Thomas > Isaac.  Thomas’ siblings included John, Jeremiah, and Edith, mentioned in the post for 13 September 2020.   Relationships pieced from a number of sources.

18.  Robert Gordon Horn.  “Henry (the Quaker) Horn.”  Horns of Tennessee/Kentucky website Henry was the son of William and brother of Jacob.  The immigrant ancestor, William, had land south of a Quaker meeting house.  Henry set two of his seven slaves free in his will.

19.  George Stevenson.  “Surginer, William.”  NC Pedia website.  1994.

20.  Old Reporter.  “Col. William Horn.”  Rocky Mount [North Carolina] Telegram.  17 March 1961.  4.  Posted by Jeanealogy058 on 21 April 2018.  William was the son of Henry.

21.  Jenkins identified Josiah Horn as another brother of Thomas. [54]

22.  R. M. Arrington.  “Shady Grove Methodist Church, Panola, Alabama.”  60–61 in The Heritage of Sumter County, Alabama.  Edited by Charles Walker.  Clayton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 2005.

23.  William Godfrey.  Will recorded 13 March 1854 by B. J. H. Gaines.  151–153 in Gwendolyn Lynette Hester.  Sumter County Alabama Wills.  Dallas: Southern Roots, 1998.  152.

24.  Clarke County Journal.  18 October 1866.  Quoted Peter Kolchin.  First Freedom.  Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972.  118.

25.  Mary Jo Square.  “The History of Shady Grove Baptist Church.”  60 in Heritage.

26.  For more on Phoebe Palmer’s camp meetings, see the post for 9 February 2020.  I’ve found neither an etymology for the term “brush arbor” nor a reference that was published before 1865.  I suspect once camp meetings (an activity) and brush arbors (a structure) became associated, they became synonymous, and once synonymous, the term brush arbor was extended back in time so that now it refers to any outdoor meeting that occurred after the Cane Ridge revival of 1801. [55]  If anyone has a published reference from before the Civil War, I’d love to see it.

27.  Kolchin.  61.

28.  T. A. Deland and A. Davis Smith.  “Jeremiah H. Brown.”  Northern Alabama, Historical and Biographical.  Birmingham, Alabama: Smith and De Land.  1888.  219.

29.  Jewell Davis Scarborough.  “Southern Kith and Kin.”  1957 edition.  59.  Roots Web website.

30.  Karen Hoy.  “John Rasberry Scarborough (1787 - 1846).”  Wiki Tree website.  10 May 2014; last updated 12 October 2019.

31.  DeLand.  The school was Howard College, now Samford University. [56]
32.  fdmal.  “Rev Abner Rasberry Scarborough.”  Find a Grave website.  12 August 2009.
33.  “Bigbee Baptist Association.”  Samford University website.

34.  Charles Octavius Boothe.  The Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama.  Birmingham: Alabama Publishing Company, 1895.  117.

35.  Edward R. Crowther.  “Interracial Cooperative Missions among Blacks by Alabama’s Baptists, 1868-1882.”  The Journal of Negro History 80:131–139:1995.  132.

36.  Boothe.  58.
37.  Payne is discussed in the post for 9 August 2017.
38.  Crowther.  132.
39.  Crowther.  133.  Boothe’s church was the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church.

40.  Boothe.  Quoted by Crowther.  134–135.  His sources were the Alabama Baptist for 20 April 1877, 2; Alabama Baptist for 17 May 1877, 1; and Minutes of the Alabama Baptist Convention, 1877, 24–25.

41.  Boothe.  117.
42.  Boothe.  58.

43.  In 1866, Scarborough purchased the plantation of John H. Gary, who was moving to Meridian, Mississippi. [57]

44.  fdmal.

45.  Jud K. Arrington.  “Bluffport.”  Arrington collection, Julia Tutwiler Library, University of West Alabama.  25 in Heritage.

46.  Tom Moore.  “Tom Moore and His Death Money.”  Transcribed by Tart.  77–79 in Brown and Owens.  77.

47.  Laura Clark.  “Children in Every Graveyard.  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  123–126 in Brown and Owens.  123.

48.  Emma Crockett.  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  Reprinted as “Ex-Slave Emma Crockett.”  29–31 in Brown and Taylor.  30.  On their “map of Sumter County showing where Ruby Pickens Tartt found singers and storytellers,” Brown and Owens showed Crockett with New Prospect. [58]  I found no mention of a Prophet church.

49.  For more information on Tartt and the WPA Slave Narratives project, see the post for 23 January 2019.

50.  Laurella Owens.  “Introduction.”  59–60 in Brown and Owens.  60.

51.  A.  “Dr James Myers Godfrey.”  Find a Grave website.  20 October 2008; updated by Doug Fitchett.

52.  Jenkins.  175.

53.  The Cummings Family of Sumter, South Carolina.  “Descendants of Nicholas Brown.”  Roots Web website.  Last updated 20 January 2019.

54.  Jenkins.  166.
55.  For more on Cane Ridge, see the post for 26 January 2020.
56.  Wikipedia.  “Samford University.”

57.  Mary H. Abbe.  “Scarborough Family.”  254 in Heritage.

Mary Anne Habbe.  “Gary/Scarborough Deed.”  November 1866.  AlGen website.

58.  Brown and Owens.  vi.

Sumter County, Alabama, Religious Institutions

Topic: Early Versions
Before the Civil War, some whites in Sumter County, Alabama, exposed their slaves to Christianity.  Two Methodists churches had balconies for slaves, [1] as did two Presbyterian buildings. [2]

Many of these churches were physically small, and the space for slaves must have been limited.  One suspects their intent was not evangelization, but providing a place were the servants, who accompanied owners’ families, were placed in an isolated area. [3]  Only the ones who tended horses would have been free to mingle with men from other plantations, and they too probably were observed.

Berry Smith recalled “de white preachers used to preach to de niggers sometimes in de white folks’ church, but I didn’ go much.”  He told interviewers he “was a house boy an’ didn’ go to de fiel’ much.”  His was born near Gainesville. [4]

However, one Presbyterian church in Sumterville did begin admitting slaves as members in 1840. [5]  In 1865, it had 188 white members and 64 Blacks. [6]  The church in Livingston had four black members in 1860. [7]  Some of these may have been among the 25 freed people who lived in the county at the time. [8]

Baptists had more churches in the Sumter County, 16 as compared to 9 Methodists, 7 Presbyterians, and 2 Episcopalian congregations. [9]  None had a balcony, although one in Sumterville allowed slaves to sit in back. [10]  Instead of taking slaves to churches, some owners, like Jeremiah Brown, sponsored services on their plantations. [11]

Amy Chapman, a slave on Reuben Chapman’s plantation was baptized at Jones Creek [12] where Abner Scarborough was minister. [13]  This liberty wasn’t permitted every slave.  As mentioned in the post for 15 September 2019, she became the mistress of the overseer, Hewey Leman. [14]  George Young, who also was owned by Chapman, said “they didn’t allow us to go to church.” [15]

A few plantation owners, like Isaac Horn, [16] let slaves hold religious meetings where “us got happy and shouted”. [17]  On other plantations, like Chapman’s, Young said “sometimes us slip off and have a little prayer meetin by usselves.” [18]

Alabama churches expected nothing would change with Emancipation. [19]   And, indeed, Scarborough continued to hold separate services for whites and Freedmen on his plantation until he died [20] in 1888. [21]

In other parts of the South, missionaries arrived from Northern churches to teach and convert newly freed children.  However, most devoted their resources to states nearer the north, “such as Virginia and North Carolina, or to states where large areas were liberated early in the war, such as Louisiana and South Carolina.” [22]  The only group the head of the Freedmen’s Bureau in Alabama could recruit was the American Missionary Society, and it focused on large cities and the school it founded in Talladega. [23]

Instead of continuity with white religious traditions, the clandestine became public.  Walter Fleming said “all through the summer of 1865 the revival meetings went on” in Alabama “conducted by new self-‘called’ colored preachers.” [24]  One new preacher, Frank Sledge, was mentioned in the post for 13 September 2020. [25]

Another was Richard Burke.  Reuben Meredith recalled:

“He was a very peaceable negro, so far as I know.  He was an old preacher.  He had been preaching there a long time.  When he was a slave of Judge Reavis’s he used to preach in the Baptist church, I have heard him preach there many a time.” [26]

Burke was born in Virginia. [27]  He moved to Gainesville after the war, and was appointed to fill a vacancy in the state legislature in 1869.  The Freedman was murdered by an unidentified masked mob the same year. [28]

During 1866, African-America groups began meeting in brush arbors including Black Bluff [29] and Friendship near Bellamy. [30]  The construction of African-American church buildings was inhibited by the mob activities mentioned in the post for 13 September 2020, and the lack of currency.  Share cropping was essentially a barter economy.

The first buildings were on land provided by former owners who also provided a measure of protection.  James George Whitefield gave land to the Black Bluff church in 1869. [34]  Most new groups still used brush arbors.

In the period when Republicans began registering Freemen to vote in the 1867, white denominations began disassociating themselves from their former Black protégées.  Peter Kolchin said Baptists, who had no hierarchical structure, feared a majority of freed members might take control of their buildings. [35]

Southern Methodists had successfully kept the independent AME and AME Zion churches out of the state before the war. [36]  The latter organized a few churches in Montgomery and Mobile after the war, [37] and a congregation appeared in Livingston in 1867. [38]

The denomination countered by sponsoring the formation of the Colored Methodist Episcopal Church in 1870. [39]  Grants Chapel near York began as brush arbor. [40]  Others eventually were organized in areas where there had been Methodist churches before the war.

The Presbyterians apparently did nothing, although they were affiliated with the Congregational churches [41] who sponsored the American Missionary Society.  So, despite the openness of some churches to slaves before 1860, there’s no evidence any African-American Presbyterian group ever existed in the county.

Freedom of worship remained conditional for both Blacks and poor whites.  The Southern Methodist church had proscribed the Holiness movement in 1894. [42]  It entered the county surreptitiously through a revival held by Arthur Kiergan that provoked the formation of the Church of God Holiness Church in Cuba in 1886. [43]

The more radical Pentecostal movement was squelched.  Robert Spratt recalled a skating rink

“became a ‘Holy Roller’ tabernacle for a while.  The sect never obtained a real foothold here, and most of those who took part in the services were from other places.  Some of the believers would roll on the floor and speak in unknown tongues.  The people here attended the services and took much interest in these proceedings.” [44]

Blacks were equally monitored.  As mentioned in the post for 23 January 2019, Ruby Pickens Tartt’s father would drive out on Sunday mornings to listen to services from outside.  Even though Charles Harrison Mason organized the Church of God in Christ in Mississippi, there’s never been a COGIC church in the county that left a record.  Instead, a few Church of Gods were organized. [45]  This was one of the alternatives to Mason’s church [46] organized by men who did not accept speaking in tongues. [47]

Instead, local Baptist conventions expanded.  In 1934, the Hope Hill Association in Demopolis held a singing convention that brought together participants from Sumter, Greene, Hale, and Marengo counties. [48]  This most likely was the way “Come by Here” breached the walls of the county to enter the repertoire of someone Tartt knew later in the decade.

Graphic
African-American Churches in Sumter County by Period
Blue - Churches in existence by 1895 when Charles Octavius Boothe published his list of Baptist groups. [49]  The map also included other churches mentioned in sources like Heritage, Jenkins, and Spratt.

Red - Churches that came into existence between 1895 and 1980 when James Pate did his survey. [50]  The map included ones mentioned by Tartt. [51]

Green - Churches mentioned since Pate, taken from Home Locator and other contemporary websites.

Base map from G. A. Swenson, et alia.  Soil Survey of Sumter County, Alabama.  Washington: United States Department of Agriculture, May 1941.  3, “Sketch map showing topographic divisions of Sumter County.”  Locations approximate.

End Notes
1.  These were Livingston Methodist Episcopal [52] and the more radical Pleasant Grove Methodist Protestant in Panola. [53]

2.  These were Gainesville [54] and Elizabeth in Gaston. [55]

3.  I’m sure someone has done research on slave balconies, but I haven’t found it.  If anyone knows of a paper or dissertation, please let me know.  Most items are architectural comments that make rosy assumptions about the motives of the churches that not may not be based on contemporary observations.

4.  Nelle Morris Jenkins.  Pioneer Families of Sumter County, Alabama.  Tuscaloosa, Alabama: Willo Publishing Company, 1961.  Reprinted by Bloutsville, Alabama: The Yarbrough National Genealogical and Historical Association, 14 June 2015.  20.

5.  Berry Smith.  “Ex-slave, Scott County.”  WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from  Mississippi. [56]  Collected by W. B. Allison, rewritten by Pauline Loveless, reprinted by Alan Brown and David Taylor.  94–98 in Gabr’l Blow Sof’.  Livingston, Alabama: Livingston Press, 1997.  94.

6.  Jenkins.  43.

7.  “Livingston Presbyterian Church.”  50–51 in The Heritage of Sumter County, Alabama.  Edited by Charles Walker.  Clayton, Alabama: Heritage Publishing Consultants, 2005.  51.  Based on Ralph M. Lyon.  “A History of the Livingston Presbyterian Church, 1833 – 1958.”  1977.  Alabama Church and Synagogue Records Collection, Alabama Department of Archives and History.

8.  Classified Population of the States and Territories by Counties on the First Day of June, 1860.  Section on Alabama posted on United States Census website.  Table 1.  “Population by Age and Sex.”  5.

9.  These numbers primarily are based on reports in Heritage, Jenkins, and Robert D. Spratt.  A History of the Town of Livingston, Alabama.  Edited by Nathaniel Reed.  Livingston: University of West Alabama, 1997.

10.  Jud K. Arrington.  “Sumterville Baptist Church.”  Arrington collection.  52 in Heritage.

11.  T. A. Deland and A. Davis Smith.  “Jeremiah H. Brown.”  From Northern Alabama, Historical and Biographical.  Birmingham, Alabama: Smith and Deland, 1888.  219.  “He gave them every Saturday the entire day for their own, and furnished them with good churches and white preachers on Sunday, and saw that they had a reasonable amount of instruction and religious training.”  Brown is mentioned in the posts for 22 September 2019 and 22 November 2020.

12.  Amy Chapman.  “The Masters Good but Overseers Mean.”  Transcribed by Ruby Pickens Tartt for the WPA’s Slave Narratives collection from Alabama. [57]  128–129 in Virginia Pounds Brown and Laurella Owens.  Toting the Lead Row.  University: The University of Alabama Press, 1981. 129.  Owens modernized Tartt’s transcriptions to make them easier to read. [58]

13.  Scarborough is discussed in the post for 22 November 2020.

14.  Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Amy Chapman’s Funeral.”  79– 83 in Brown and Owens.  80.

15.  George Young.  “Peter Had No Keys ’ceptin His.”  Transcribed by Tartt, WPA.  120–122 in Brown and Owens.  121.  A fuller quotation appears in the post for 22 September 2019.

16.  Horn is discussed in the posts for 22 September 2020 and 22 November 2020.  

17.  Ruby Pickens Tartt.  “Alice.”  Southwest Review 34:192–195:1949.  Reprinted by Brown and Owens.  103.  Her source from Josh Horn.  A fuller quotation appears in the post for 22 September 2020.

18.  Young.  121.
19.  Peter Kolchin.  First Freedom.  Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1972.  109.

20.  Bettie Tolbert.  “Lost to the Refugee Wagons.”  Transcribed by Tartt.  127–139 in Brown and Owens.  137.  “Marse Abner died right after he done finish a sermon to us (’cause he preach first to the white folks, then to the niggers).”

21.  fdmal.  “Rev Abner Rasberry Scarborough.”  Find a Grave website.  12 August 2009.
22.  Kolchin.  80.

23.  Walter L. Fleming.  Civil War and Reconstruction in Alabama.  New York: The Macmillan Company, 1905.  459.  The Bureau head was Wager Swayne.

24.  Fleming.  272.

25.  Sledge’s religious role was remembered by Blacks, but was not mentioned at the time by whites.  They only recalled the name of his former owner.

26.  Reuben A. Meridith.  Testimony, Livingston, Alabama.  2 November 1871.  United States Congress.  Joint Select Committee.  The Condition of Affairs in Late Insurrectionary States.  Alabama.  Volume III.  Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872.  1771.  As mentioned in the post for 22 September 2019, this was at a time when state law required “five respectable slave-holders” be present whenever a Black preached.

27.  Cherise Williams Newsome.  “Her Quest to Fill Genealogical Gaps.”  The [Norfolk] Virginian-Pilot.  29 January 2014.  18–19 in the advertising supplement.”  Her subject was Thelma Young Carroll, whose father was a relative of Burke.

28.  George W. Houston.  Testimony, Montgomery, Alabama.  17 October 1671.  Alabama.  Volume II.  998.  Houston is discussed in the post for 13 September 2020.

29.  Ida Gayle.  “Black Bluff Missionary Baptist Church.”  Collected by Jud Arrinton.  Tutwiler Library.  44 in Heritage.

30.  “A Brief History of Friendship Missionary Baptist Church, Bellamy, AL.”  47 in Heritage.

34.  Gayle.  Whitfield was too well connected to be harassed by the Klan.  His father, [59] James Bryan Whitfield, [60] was the brother of Nathan Bryan Whitfield, a powerful man living in nearby Demopolis.  Andrew Johnson personally pardoned Nathan’s son for his activities during the war. [61]

35.  Kolchin.  111–112.
36.  Kolchin.  108.
37.  Kolchin.  110.
38.  “Brief History of A.M.E. Zion Church — Livingston, Alabama.”  64–65 in Heritage.

39.  “Christian Methodist Episcopal Church.”  Encyclopædia Britannica website.  20 July 1998; last updated by Satyavrat Nirala on 11 August 2014.  Discussions for the new denomination began in 1866.  The name was changed from “Colored” to “Christian” in 1956.

40.  Anne Gyps.  “History of Zion Hill Baptist Church.”  65 in Heritage.

41.  In 1801, Presbyterians and Congregationalists agreed to combine flocks on the Ohio frontier and use whichever clergymen were present.  The Plan of Union was brokered by Jonathan Edwards. [62]

42.  The reaction of Methodist hierarchies to Phoebe Palmer’s theory of Holiness is discussed in the post for 9 February 2020.

43.  Elizabeth Geeslin.  “The History of the Cuba Church of God (Holiness).” 44 in Heritage.  Kiergan left the Southwestern Holiness Association to form the Church of God in 1883. [63]  I suspect the revival was held in Mississippi where the new denomination had churches. [64]  The Cuba church was organized before the  economic independence discussed in the post for 20 September 2020.

44.  Spratt.  108.

45.  James Pate.  “Survey of Black Churches in Sumter County Alabama 1980-1981.”  University of Western Alabama website.

46.  The Church of God in Christ is discussed in the post for 23 December 2017.
47.  Wikipedia.  “Original Church of God or Sanctified Church.”

48.  Item.  The Demopolis [Alabama] Times.  11 October 1934.  1.  Posted by stamfordwalker.  4 July 2019.  Tammy Jackson Montgomery and Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine reprinted a program from the 52nd meeting of the Mount Hermon District Singing Convention held in 1970.  They indicated that group used shaped notes. [65]

49.  Charles Octavius Boothe.  The Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama.  Birmingham: Alabama Publishing Company, 1895.  59.

50.  Pate.

51.  Brown and Owens provided a “map of Sumter County showing where Ruby Pickens Tartt found singers and storytellers” on page vi.

52.  Spratt.  20.  “There was a gallery for slaves—unless the preaching was for slaves especially and then the white people occupied the gallery.”

53.  Jud K. Arrington.  “Pleasant Grove (Shady Grove) Methodist Church.”  Arrington collection, Julia Tutwiler Library, University of West Alabama.  57 in Heritage.

54.  Caption for photograph of Gainesville Presbyterian Church.  19 in Heritage.

55.  Jud K. Arrington.  “Elizabeth Presbyterian Church (1838 — 1946).”  Arrington collection.  47 in Heritage.  The balcony continued to be used “(at least with former slaves) through the 1870s.”

56.  For more information on the WPA Slave Narratives project, see the post for 23 January 2019.

57.  For more information on Tartt’s involvement with the WPA, see the post for 23 January 2019.

58.  Laurella Owens.  “Introduction.”  59–60 in Brown and Owens.  60.
59.  “James George Whitfield.”  Ancestry website.
60.  “Gen. James Bryan Whitfield.”  Geni website.  23 April 2019.
61.  Wikipedia.  “Whitfield Family of the United States.”

62.  Sydney E. Ahlstrom.  A Religious History of the American People.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.  456.

63.  Wikipedia.  “Church of God (Holiness).”

64.  Charles Edwin Jones.  “Churches of God.”  67–68 in The A to Z of the Holiness Movement.  Edited by William Kostlevy.  Lanham, Maryland: The Scarecrow Press, 2010.

65.  Tammy Jackson Montgomery and Gwendolyn Moore DeLaine.  Back Then.  University of Western Alabama website.  54.  Leola S. Moore provided the copy.

Camp Meeting Signs

Topic: Early Versions
Religious movements define appropriate and inappropriate ways for individuals to express themselves.  Today, speaking in tongues is the only method accepted by the Assembly of God, but other Pentecostal groups acknowledge hearing voices and being healed by faith as signs of grace.

In 1801, the Cane Ridge Revival used the same exercises [1] that Barton Warren Stone observed at a Logan County, Kentucky, Presbyterian camp meeting earlier that year:

“Many, very many fell down, as men slain in battle, and continued for hours together in an apparently breathless and motionless state—sometimes for a few moments reviving, and exhibiting symptoms of life by a deep groan, or piercing shriek, or by a prayer for mercy most fervently uttered.  After lying thus for hours, they obtained deliverance.  The gloomy cloud, which had covered their faces, seemed gradually and visibly to disappear, and hope in smiles brightened into joy—they would rise     deliverance, and then would address the surrounding multitude in language truly eloquent and impressive.” [2]

Thirty years after Cane Ridge trance-like states still occurred in Methodist camp meetings in areas settled by the Scots Irish in the 1820s.  Francis Lieber visited a camp meeting in 1834 held in Chester County, Pennsylvania, where many first had landed. [3]  He advised a friend in Germany that “the peculiar trait” of Methodists

“distinguishing it from all other protestant denominations, is what they would term an excitement of feeling; they would call it an agitation produced by the power of God, or the powerful effect of the divine spirit, or would characterize it by an expression of this kind.

“Camp-meetings, if I have properly understood the explanations, given me by methodists themselves, are held, for the purpose of promoting this powerful effect, with the followers of this creed, and thereby of strengthening religion in their souls, as also, in order to excite in persons not yet converted, that state of overwhelming contrition, which according to methodism, must generally precede conversion and regeneration.” [4]

He noted many types of agitation including some “lying on the ground, distended as if in a swoon, some sitting in a state of perfect exhaustion and inanity, with pale cheeks and vacant eyes, which bore traces of many tears.” [5]

Lieber was a Prussian emigrant who then was advising Girard College on curriculum. [6]  After looking more closely at two young women, he commented to his friend:

“Indeed, any physician will tell you whether it be possible, that an individual can lie for two or three hours together in a state of real exhaustion and unconsciousness, deprived of all the power of volition, without laboring under a serious affliction of the nervous system and experiencing the evil consequences of such a fit for several weeks.  Yet these individuals appear a few hours after, in a comparatively sound state of health.” [7]

Stone and Lieber mentioned other physical manifestations, but most occurred in the time before an individual fell into the trance-like state and were actions that accompanied or contributed to the final result.  The most interesting term in contemporary accounts was “shouting.”

The official historian of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church claimed:

“Presbyterians generally condemned shouting, and this feature of McGready’s meetings, after McGee’s visits, was one of the grounds of their bitter complaints.  So it is probable that the ‘shouting,’ once so common, now so rare, among Cumberland Presbyterians was of Methodist parentage.” [8]
 
Peter Cartwright described his mother’s conversion in 1793 in Logan County when he was nine years old.

“Jacob Lurton was a real son of thunder.  He preached with tremendous power, and the congregation were almost all melted to tears; some cried aloud for mercy, and my mother shouted aloud for joy.” [9]

Francis Asbury, who organized the Methodist Church in Baltimore after the Revolution, used the term in a number of ways in his journal in those years.  In October 1800, he used it to separate people who became interested from those who had become members at a meeting held immediately after the one in Logan County.

“We began our quarterly meeting at Elmour Douglas’s.  Brother Whatcoat preached; brothers M’Kendree and M’Gee exhorted.  At the evening meeting there were more shouters than converts; nevertheless the Lord was in the midst.” [10]

A couple times he used the word to describe responses of people who attended meetings.   In October 1801, he noted “On Friday and Saturday evenings, and on Sabbath morning there was the noise of praise and shouting in the meetinghouse.” [11]  A month later, he “spoke in the woods at a small distance from the chapel” and remarked “I was often interrupted by singing and shouting.” [12]

He used the term as an adjective in 1803 to summarize a meeting in western Pennsylvania.  By then, it had come to mean a particular kind of event.

“On Saturday I came to the quarterly meeting; I preached, and we had an open time: at the night meeting it was a shouting time.” [13]

I haven’t seen enough accounts to judge if the use of the word “shout” developed independently among slaves and their owners, or if whites used a word for decibel level to generalize about Black behavior that then became an accepted common term.  The underlying physiological behaviors were probably the same, but driven by different cultural patterns.

One of Asbury’s earliest uses of the term after hearing about McGready appeared in a journal entry made when he was visiting old friends on the Gunpowder River in Maryland.

“I came on to Perry-Hall.  Here were things to arrest my attention—out of sixty or seventy servants, many shouting and praising God.” [14]

Asbury was describing an event on a plantation where white owners may have been in the same room as their slaves.  In camp meetings, like Cane Ridge, [15] Blacks tended to congregate in separate areas.  As mentioned in the post for 18 September 2018, Fredrika Bremer visited a camp meeting in Macon, Georgia, in May 1850 that had separate services for slaves and whites.

At the 1834 Pennsylvania meeting, Lieber observed: “There was, also, a considerable number of negroes at the camp-meeting of Westchester: a separate place had been assigned to them, nor had they any tent.” [16]  More important, in what was essentially a venue controlled by whites some of whom may have been their owners and some the employers of free men

“They seemed to me to behave very quietly here; it is not so in the meeting-houses of the colored people.  There, their boisterous violence is greater in proportion to their greater ignorance.  Some years ago I went into one of the principal methodist meetinghouses of colored people in Philadelphia, and I never shall forget the impression made upon me by the unbounded excitement and passion of the congregation.” [17]

End Notes
The word “shouting” has been bolded in quotations.

1.  “Exercises” was the contemporary term for religious manifestations.

2.  Barton Warren Stone.  The Biography of Eld. Barton Warren Stone.  Cincinnati: American Christian Publication Society, 1853 edition.  34-35.  He was describing the 1801 Gasper River meeting held by James McGready, mentioned in the post for 8 November 2020, that inspired Stone to hold his revival at Cane Ridge.

3.  James G. Leyburn.  The Scotch-Irish.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962.  196–197.

4.  Francis Lieber.  Letters to a Gentleman in Germany, Written after a Trip from Philadelphia to Niagara.  Philadelphia: Carey, Lea and Blanchard, 1834.  303.

5.  Lieber.  315.

6.  Albert Bernhardt Faust.  The German Element in the United States.  Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1909 2:166.

7.  Lieber.  317.

8.  B. W. McDonnold.  History of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.  Nashville: Cumberland Presbyterian Church, Board of Publication, 1899.  18.  For more on James McGready and John McGee, see the post for 8 November 2020.

9.  Autobiography of Peter Cartwright.  Edited by W. P. Strickland.  Cincinnati: L. Swormstedt and A. Poe, 1859.  23.  Cartwright was mentioned in the post for 8 November 2020.  Lurton was a Methodist preacher.

10.  Francis Asbury.  The Journal of the Rev. Francis Asbury.  New York: N. Bangs and T. Mason, 1821.  2:397.  Entry for 23 October 1800 in Tennessee.

11.  Asbury.  3:38.  Entry for 30 October 1801.
12.  Asbury.  3:38.  Entry for 29 November 1801.
13.  Asbury.  3:112.  Entry for 11 August 1803.

14.  Asbury.  3:32.   Entry for 3 August 1801.  The servants no doubt were the slaves of Harry Gough and his wife Prudence Ridgely. [18]

15.  For more on Blacks at Cane Ridge, see the post for 8 November 2020.
16.  Lieber.  327.
17.  Lieber.  327.

18.  “A History of Camp Chapel United Methodist Church.”  Perry Hall, Maryland.  Its website.

Camp Meetings

Topic: Early Versions
The idea of holding a public assembly to convert people to Protestantism was a uniquely Methodist idea.  Lutherans were born into religious communities.  Calvinists were selected by God before birth; conversion was an impossibility. One either was or was not; one could not become saved.

George Whitfield created the rhetorical style, while John Wesley developed the organizing techniques necessary to instruct converts.  The size of Whitefield’s audiences was noticed, and his methods were copied by Calvinists like Jonathan Edwards in the Northeast in 1741. [1]

The mingling of ideas continued among the Scots Irish who left Ulster in waves: 1717–1718, 1725–1729, 1740–1741, and 1754–1755.  They moved first to Pennsylvania, where William Penn’s colony was more welcoming than the Puritans of New England.  In the 1740s, they began moving into western Virginia through the Shenandoah valley. [2]

The governor of North Carolina began actively recruiting immigrants, and in 1753 a group in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, leased land from John Carteret [3] in what would become Guilford County. [4]  The grant was east of Quaker settlements and west of German refugees from the Palatinate. [5]  While each group stayed within its boundaries, they no longer were completely isolated from one another.

James McGready was born in Pennsylvania in 1763. [6]  It’s possible his parents came in the third wave as indentured servants, and were free to marry in 1761 or 1762.  They were in Guilford County by June 1776 when their son Israel was born. [7]  The elder McGready was able to buy land from David Caldwell in 1784. [8]  Caldwell was the local preacher, and had married the daughter of another Presbyterian minister, one converted by Whitfield. [9]

An uncle took McGready back to Pennsylvania in the early 1780s [10] where he was sent to a school influenced by Presbyterian revivalists who believed in a conversion experience that depended on  “experimental” rather than “intellectual knowledge.” [11]

McGready attended his first genuine revival at Hampden-Sydney College in 1788 when he was returning to North Carolina. [12]  He was able to observe “how effective a preacher could be in promoting it.” [13]

His first attempts at preaching the need to modify behavior were greeted with hostility in Orange County, North Carolina. [14]  McGready left in 1796 to follow some of his parishioners to Logan County, [15] on the Kentucky border with Tennessee.  His sermons on the need for repentance gradually took hold, and a revival of sorts spread through the churches he pastored. [16]

 

In 1799, he held a meeting on Red River that drew upon older Scots-Irish traditions of four-day gatherings centered on communal Lord’s Suppers.  Hours-long sermons were accompanied by psalm and hymn singing, and sometimes resulted in ecstatic experiences in the forms of dreams, visions, and unseen voices.  In Scotland, ministers encouraged the first, indeed condemned those who didn’t sing as Judases.  They were more wary of the second, lest they brought the attention of hostile authorities.  Leigh Schmidt noted, they selectively included references to the supernatural in their official accounts. [17]

McGready invited other Presbyterian ministers to speak, including William McGee, whom he had known in Guilford County.  On the final day, “a woman in the east end of the house got an uncommon blessing, broke through order, and shouted for some time, and then sat down in silence.” [18]

William’s brother John noted, at the end of the sermons, “the people seemed to have no disposition to leave their seats.”  A power took over “which caused me to tremble.” [19]

“Having a wish to preach, I strove against my feelings; at length I rose up and told the people, I was appointed to preach, but there was a greater than I preaching, and exhorted them to let the Lord God Omnipotent reign in their hearts, and to submit to Him, and their souls should live.  Many broke silence, the woman in the east end of the house shouted tremendously, I left the pulpit to go to her.” [20]

Unlike his Presbyterian brother, John had been converted to Methodism by the head of the church in this country, Francis Asbury.  As he went “through the people” to reach the woman, “it was suggested to me, ‘You know these people are much for order, they will not bear this confusion, go back and be quiet’.” [21]  Despite their remonstrances

“the power of God was strong upon me, I turned again, and loosing sight of the fear of man, I went through the house shouting, and exhorting with all possible ecstacy and energy, and the floor was soon covered with the slain; their screams for mercy pierced the heavens, and mercy came down; some found forgiveness, and many went away from that meeting, feeling unutterable agonies of soul for redemption in the blood of Jesus.” [22]

The paradigm for conversion — the preaching technique and the evidence of salvation — was set for others to follow.

The venue was defined that same summer when McGready noticed families had arrived in wagons with enough food to last a week.  He urged others to follow their example at another gathering he was holding on the Gasper River. [23]

Ministers from Guilford County, who had spoken at McGready’s meetings, took his example back to their congregations.  John McGee held a camp meeting at Smith County north of Nashville in August. [24]  William Hodge held a Presbyterian revival in neighboring Sumner county in September, and John Rankin moved through Presbyterians in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. [25]  In October, Asbury met the three and asked for accounts of McGready’s meetings. [26]

Barton Warren Stone heard about McGready’s success, and planned his own camp meeting in northern Kentucky in 1801.  Cane Ridge drew crowds counted in the thousands.  He hadn’t been born a Presbyterian, but had converted after hearing McGready at Caldwell’s school. [27]  He made sure Baptists and Methodists were aware they would be welcome. [28]

Newell Williams said the Cane Ridge revival began conventionally enough, but the number who came was unprecedented.  On Saturday, preaching in the meeting house was non-stop, and outside four or five were speaking at the same time.  People began falling to the ground. [29]

Not many Methodists were allowed to join the Lord’s Supper, but their preachers were among those speaking outside.  Williams thought few Baptists attended, partly because they were holding their own convention in Lexington. [30]

He found evidence on Sunday that “there was also preaching by an unidentified African American preacher to a group comprised largely of African Americans probably about 150 yards southeast of the meeinghouse.” [31]

After rain stopped on Sunday, Williams said “preaching, exhorting, and falling continued throughout the camp.”  On Monday, after the thanksgiving sermon, the service entered a new phase when people refused to leave.  People wanted “more singing, praying, and preaching,” and ministers were willing to oblige. [32]  People continued to arrive until Wednesday, when “provisions for such a multitude failed in the neighborhood.” [33]

Asbury assimilated camp meetings into the Methodist church’s frontier organizational structure: ministers preached sermons in local churches following defined circuits for months, and then large groups met for quarterly and annual camp meetings.  The denomination’s most important frontier evangelist, Peter Cartwright, was raised in Logan County and converted by McGready. [34]

Baptists depended on individuals to organize their own churches, and regional associations like the one in Lexington.  As a rule, William Nowlin said they “declined to join in general camp meetings.” [35]  He didn’t believe they became active evangelists until the rise of Missionary Baptists in 1837. [36]

Presbyterians, swayed by their more conservative leaders, rejected camp meetings.  Three groups broke away: the Christians led by Stone in 1803, the Disciples of Christ led by Thomas Campbell in 1809, and the Cumberland Presbyterians the same year.  In 1832, the Stoneites and the Campbellites, as they were called, merged into a single denomination. [37]

Graphics
L. B. Folger.  Map included in B. W. McDonnold.  History of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church.  Nashville: Cumberland Presbyterian Church, Board of Publication, 1899.  Facing 1.

End Notes
1.  See the post for 2 November 2017 for a brief discussion of Whitefield and Edwards.

2.  James G. Leyburn.  The Scotch-Irish.  Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1962.  169–172.  There was one later migration that began in 1771 and ended when the colonies cut ties with United Kingdom.  After the Revolution, the UK directed its emigrants to its other colonies.

3.  When England repurchased the royal grants in North Carolina in 1729, Carteret refused to sell.  His family kept control of the land until the American Revolution. [38]

4.  John Thomas Scott.  “James McGready: Son of Thunder, Father of the Great Revival.”  PhD dissertation.  College of William and Mary, November 1991.  37.  The group was the Nottingham Company.

5.  Sallie W. Stockard.  The History of Guilford County, North Carolina.  Knoxville. Tennessee: Gaut-Ogden, 1902.  13.

6.  “Family of Rev. James McGready.”  Website for the Historical Foundation of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church and the Cumberland Presbyterian Church in America.  Last updated 10 December 2015.

7.  Cumberland Presbyterian Foundation.  Details on the other children are missing.  Their existence seems to be known from McGready’s father’s will. [39]

8.  Scott.  37.
9.  Scott.  39.
10.  Scott.  41.
11.  Scott.  46.
12.  Scott.  70.
13.  Scott.  76.
14.  Scott.  116.
15.  Scott.  120.
16.  Scott.  116.

17.  Leigh Eric Schmidt.  Holy Fairs.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989.  On the general form, 61; on singing, 97–98; on ecstatic experiences, 145–152.  The post for 26 January 2020 mentions Schmidt’s belief that pastors tolerated the ecstatic experiences that appeared in Scots Presbyterian kirks so long as they didn’t attract the attention of authorities.

18.  John M’Gee.  Letter to Thomas L. Douglass.  June 23, 1820.  Published as “Commencement of the Great Revival of Religion in Kentucky and Tennessee, in 1799.”  The Methodist Magazine 4:189-191:May 1821.  190.  When he wrote his memoir twenty years later, he believed the events had occurred in 1799.  Benjamin Wilburn McDonnold noted other witnesses recall it occurred in 1800. [40]

19.  M’Gee.  190.
20.  M’Gee.  190.
21.  M’Gee.  190.
22.  M’Gee.  190.
23.  Scott.  134.
24.  Conrad Ostwalt.  “Camp Meetings.”  Tennessee Encyclopedia of History and Culture.
25.  Wikipedia.  “Revival of 1800.”

26.  Francis Asbury.  The Journal of the Rev. Francis Asbury.  New York: N. Bangs and T. Mason, 1821.  2:396.  Entries for 20 October 1800, 21 October 1800, and 23 October 1800.

27.  Barton Warren Stone.  The Biography of Eld. Barton Warren Stone.  Cincinnati: American Christian Publication Society, 1853 edition.  He was raised in Maryland. [41]  After the Revolutionary war, Baptists and Methodists flooded the area. [42]  He went to Caldwell’s school to study law, [43] and there came under the influence of Presbyterians. [44]  He made the final step at  Hampden-Sydney. [45]

28.  D. Newell Williams.  “Cane Ridge Revival.”  164-166 in The Encyclopedia of the Stone-Campbell Movement.  Edited by Douglas A. Foster, Paul M. Blowers, Anthony L. Dunnavant, and Williams.  Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2004.  164.

29.  Williams.  165.
30.  Williams.  166.
31.  Williams.  165.
32.  Williams.  165.
33.  Stone.  38.

34.  Autobiography of Peter Cartwright.  Edited by W. P. Strickland.  Cincinnati: L. Swormstedt and A. Poe, 1859.  36–38.  

35.  William Dudley Nowlin.   Kentucky Baptist History, 1770---1922.  Louisville, Kentucky: Baptist Book Concern, 1922.  63.

36.  Nowlin.  47.

37.  Sydney E. Ahlstrom.  A Religious History of the American People.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 1972.  445–452.  The Disciples of Christ are discussed in posts for Pamlico County, North Carolina. [46]  The Cumberland Presbyterian Church is mentioned in posts about Arkansas and Texas. [47]

38.  Thornton W. Mitchell.  “Granville Grant and District.”  NC Pedia website.  2006.

Wikipedia.  “John Carteret, 2nd Earl Granville.”

39.  Marsha George Richeson.  “Descendants of James McGready.” Genealogy website.
40.  McDonnold.  16.
41.  Stone.  1.
42.  Stone.  4–5.
43.  Stone.  6.
44.  Stone.  7–8.
45.  Stone.  9–10.
46.  The most important post is the one for 26 January 2020.
47.  See the posts for 28 August 2019 and 11 April 2021.

May Titus’ Interests

 

Topic: CRS Version
Claire Lennon’s suggestion that she was the source for the CRS version of “Come by Here” [1] assumes May Titus had the ability and opportunity to teach it to others.  Unfortunately, any interest or aptitude Titus had in music or singing is hidden behind the Methodist church’s definition of the life well lived.

In the nineteenth century, Phoebe Palmer had argued one needed some religious experience to know one was saved, and that, after that experience, one was obliged to live a life of Holiness.  After denouncing her theology, the Methodist church hierarchy eliminated the first demand, and turned the second into a more rigid version of John Wesley’s list of “Do Nots.” [2]

Individuals existed in every congregation who scrutinized the behavior of others.  Families of clergymen and single women, especially school teachers, were most carefully monitored.  There was a reason preacher’s kids formed their own club at Syracuse University. [3]

During the two years Titus was attending Syracuse, her photograph did not appear with the women’s glee club. [4]  She later enrolled at the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut.  The registrar there could find no “mention of extracurricular or club activity” for her. [5]

When Titus was attending the Hartford Seminary in the fall of 1932, she took a class titled “Play, Recreation and Leisure Time Activities.”  At the time, church recreation leaders still were stressing games as alternatives to dancing, and it promised “a study of play, games, folk dances, and their leadership.”  Music was not mentioned. [6]

The Methodist hierarchy provided a positive program to complement the list of actions to foreswear, like swearing and dancing.  It subsumed Palmer’s work with the Five Points Mission [7] into the Social Gospel of Washington Gladden. [8]  Individuals, especially women, were expected to support social outreach programs.

Employment by the Women’s Division of Christian Service probably was inevitable since Titus bachelor’s degree was in religious education. [9]  Her supervisor on the Division’s committee for missionary education was a man.  Another man was responsible for adult programs, while she was responsible for activities for youth, and a woman was in charge of the children’s section. [10]

During the 1950s, songbooks were produced by the denomination’s Youth Department, but not by the one in the women’s division.  The post for 9 February 2020 mentions the work of Larry Eisenberg and Wallace Chappell.  Titus went to meetings with both on chartered buses, [11] so she probably was exposed to the songs then being taught to young people.

Titus maintained the persona of the good Methodist woman when she sent a Christmas letter in 1965 to her family and friends.  She was responding to a request from a friend the previous year who said she’d “like to hear about you and your work and your sister’s too.” [12]

She devoted two paragraphs to her job.  She then mentioned her roommate was teaching in a large, segregated, secondary school in Nashville where she was teaching remedial reading under a program sponsored by the Ford Foundation.  She mentioned her sister Julia’s job with the African-American Allen School, before closing “I want to echo what an oversea’s missionary wrote recently--‘my single wish for you all is the happiness of a life with a mission.’” [13]

It’s difficult, in these post-liberation years, to understand the range of possibilities implied by the words the woman “with whom I live in Nashville.” [14]  In those years, single women often roomed together as a shield against the gossip that could get them fired.  Titus was 56 years old in 1965.

Lucille Bovet was born in Schenectady, New York, in 1912, [15] three years after Titus.  Her father died in 1915, and was buried in the German Methodist section of the local cemetery. [16]  Lucille was living with her 61-year-old mother in 1940, [17] but the next year they moved to the small town where her brother was the school doctor. [18]  She had been hired to teach first grade. [19]

Lucille’s mother died in 1946, [20] the same year Titus moved to Nashville.  The two met when Titus was working for the Methodist church in Schenectady in the early 1940s, and Lucille moved to be her roommate. [21]  In 1955, Lucille was working with children with cerebral palsy. [22]

In her 1965 epistle, Titus said the she and Lucille had spent Thanksgiving with Julia and Josephine Litchfield in Asheville, North Carolina.  Julia’s housemate was raised in Bay City, Michigan, [23] and pledged Chi Omega when she was at the Methodist’s college in Albion. [24]

The year after she graduated, 1921, she was teaching English at the Allen School. [25]  She wasn’t on the faculty in the 1930s, [26] but was teaching junior high English, religious education, and piano in 1946. [27]  By 1953, the 64-year-old woman was librarian and closely associated with Julia. [28]

Music is one interest that draws strangers to one another, and, among family and friends, can be played or sung at get-togethers.  Lucille’s brother and sister were talented musicians, although a relative said Lucille only played the piano a little. [29]  Unfortunately, this is as close as I’ve gotten to Titus having enough of an affinity for music for Lennon to teach her a song.

The only personal information in May’s letter was the report that Julia and Jo owned a dog, Topsy. [30]  Lucille’s relative remembered Lucille and May used to housesit when her family went on vacation.  “May loved cats, so our’s got loving care when she was there.” [31]

By the 1970s, events overtook the Titus sisters.  May turned 65 in late 1974, and probably retired.  After a “ federal judge ordered the integration of public high schools in Asheville” in 1973, the church closed the Allen School in 1974. [32]  Julia moved to Brooks-Howell home for retired Methodist deaconesses the next year. [33]

Life in institutions is temporary, no longer how long it lasts.  Titus’ father, Homer, had responded to his peripatetic life by acquiring a summer home in Moriah township, New York, in the 1920s. [34]  Lucille’s relative told me, Lucille bought Julia’s interest in the house, and “she and May would spend time there in the summer.” [35]

The two sold their place in Nashville in 1995, [36] and moved to the Brooks-Howell Home.  Lucille died in 2002, [37] and May a year later. [38]  May, like Julia [39] and many of their ancestors, was buried in the South Moriah cemetery. [40]

In the post for 1 November 2020, I observed the discoverable facts about the backgrounds of Lennon and May Titus revealed differences that existed between Blacks in the South and whites in New England.  Ironically, Lennon was the one more willing to reveal things about herself to Lynn Rohrbough in 1956, albeit cautiously, after living some fifteen years in the security of the African-American community of Asheville.  The Methodist-reared Titus never felt free, even when writing to members of her family.

As result, no doubt exists that Lennon knew a version of “Come by Here” and that she taught it to Titus.  It isn’t known if that occurred before the summer of 1952, when Melvin Blake had to have heard the song in Nashville.  It seems more likely Lennon would remember something more recent in 1956.

Even if Titus learned the song early enough to be Blake’s source, the question remains: would she have taught it to others?

Even though the Lennon-Titus-Blake link remains hypothetical, the fact Lennon knew the song before 1915 is important.  The fact she taught it to a white also is important as an example of how an African-American religious song crossed the color line in the segregated South.

Graphics
May Titus, right, with her sister, Julia, and father, Homer.  Original in Mission Photograph Album.  Copy courtesy of The United Methodist Church’s General Commission on Archives and History.  My thanks to Frances Lyons of the archives at Drew University for helping me gain permission.

A photograph of May Titus in college appears on the Photos K tab.  This is dated “1950s.”  A later picture appears in the “Legends” article.

End Notes
1.  Claire Lennon is discussed in the posts from 14 October 2020 through 28 October 2020.

2.  This is discussed in the post for 9 February 2020.

3.  The post for 1 November 2020 mentions Titus joined the Preacher’s Kids Club when she was a student at Syracuse University.

4.  Onondagan.  Syracuse University yearbook, 1929.  Edited by William A. Swallow.  62.

Onondagan.  Syracuse University yearbook, 1930.  Edited by Edward C. Reifenstein Jr.  255.

5.  Registrar, Hartford Seminary.  Email.  22 August 2018.

6.  “May L. Titus.  Summary of her courses, 1931–1933.”  Hartford Seminary.  Compiled 10 November 1964.  Copy provided by the registrar.  I don’t know if the course was a requirement or an elective.  If it were an elective, it could have been a positive choice, or the least bad of the offerings.

7.  Palmer’s Five Points Mission is mentioned in the posts for 25 November 2017 and 14 July 2019.

8.  Wikipedia.  “Social Gospel” and “Washington Gladden.”
9.  Hartford Seminary, letter.

10.  Horace Williams was executive secretary for the department.  Edwin Tewksbury handled “Adult Work” and E. Mae Young was responsible for “Children’s Work.”  The makeup of the group didn’t vary under the Women’s Division. [41]

11.  See End Notes for post for 1 November 2020.

12.  May Titus.  Letter to Family and Friends.  Christmas 1965.  Typed, mimeographed.  Copy from one in the files of Hartford Seminary provided by the registrar.

13.  May Titus, letter.
14.  May Titus, letter.
15.  Extract from the 1940 Census posted on Roots Point website.
16.  Thomas Dunne.  "Warren P Bovet."  Find a Grave website.  23 June 2011.
17.  Extract from the 1940 Census posted on Ancestry website.

18.  Obituary for Donald W. Bovet.  “New York Obituary and Death Notice Archive.”  2076.  Posted by Gen Lookups website.  11 May 2017.

19.   “Faculty Members Named for 1941-42 At Marion School.”  Newark [New York] Courier-Gazette.  3 July 1941.  1.

20.  Thomas Dunne.  "Jessie E Pepper Bovet."  Find a Grave website.  23 June 2011.

21.  “Mrs. Homer F. Titus.”  Obituary.  The [Troy, New York] Times Record.  4 August 1958.  Posted by Stephen Payne to “Cora Powlesland Titus.”  Find a Grave website.  11 November 2012.

Jeanne Marie Bovet Beecher.  Letter.  2 November 2020.  Handwritten.

22.  Item.  International Council for Exceptional Children.  Bulletin.  1 October 1955.

23.  “History of the Class of 1916.  The Orient yearbook for Bay City, Michigan, Eastern High School.  Reprinted on Mi Family website.

24.  Alpha Chi Omega.  The Lyre 27:281:January 1924.  Litchfield was back in Michigan attending the homecoming game.

25.  Muriel Day.  “Message from a Veteran and a New Recruit.”  Women’s Home Missions 38:12:May 1921.

26.  “Allen Home and School.”  43 in Methodist Episcopal Church, The Women’s Home Missionary Society.  Annual Report for 1932–1933.  Cincinnati, Ohio: The Women’s Home Missionary Society.

27.  “Allen High School.”  67 in Look on the Fields, White Unto Harvest.  New York: The Methodist Church.  Woman’s Division of Christian Service of the Board of Missions and Church Extension.  Annual Report for 1945-1946.

28.  “Allen High School.”  54 in Where Your Treasure Is...  New York: The Methodist Church. Woman’s Division of Christian Service of the Board of Missions and Church Extension.  Annual Report for 1 June 1953 to 31 May 1954.  In 1953, a Durham newspaper reported Litchfield “has been granted a semester’s leave of absence in order that she might join the school’s principal, Miss Julia Titus in Southern Rhodesia, Africa.  Miss Titus has been in Africa since November of last year.” [42]

29.  Jeanne Beecher.  Letter.  17 September 2018.  Handwritten.  “Lucille & May I’m sure enjoyed music as all my family did.  I don’t know if they had any special skill on any special instrument.  I think Lucille could play the piano a bit but it was her sister [name] who had a special ability there.”  She then discusses the musical interests of Lucille’s brother before adding “I don’t know if Lucille or May sang in any groups such as a church choir??”

30.  May Titus, letter.
31.  Jeanne Beecher.  Letter.  18 October 2018.  Handwritten.

32.  Jackie R. Booker.  “Allen High School (Asheville, North Carolina): 1884–1974.”  Oxford University Press, Oxford African American Studies Center website.

33.  Julia P. Titus.  Obituary.  Asheville [North Carolina] Citizen-Times.  29 July 1990.  20.  Brooks-Howell is mentioned in the post for 25 October 2020.

34.  W. B. Osborne.  “Rev. Homer F. Titus.”  Prominent People of the Capital District.  Albany, New York: Fort Orange Recording Bureau, 1923.  165.

35.  Beecher, 18 October 2018.
36.  Item.  The [Nashville] Tennessean.  22 November 1995.  68.
37.  Beecher, 18 October 2018.
38.  Stephen Payne.  “May T Titus.”  Find a Grave website.  11 November 2012.
39.  Stephen Payne.  “Julia Pauline Titus.”  Find a Grave website.  11 November 2012.
40.  Payne, May Titus.

41.  “Section of Education and Cultivation.”  7 in The Fruits of Discipleship.  New York: The Methodist Church.  Woman’s Division of Christian Service of the Board of Missions.  Annual Report for 1954-1955.

42.  Item.  The [Durham, North Carolina] Carolina Times.  23 September 1953.  4.

May Titus’ Life

Topic: CRS Version
Claire Lennon believed the version of “Come by Here” she taught May Titus was the source for the CRS version of “Kumbaya.” [1]  Titus was the sister of the white principal of the Allen School for African-American girls in Asheville, North Carolina, where Lennon was superintendent.

Their lives are a contrast in Black and white.  I’ve found nothing about Lennon’s family, not even the names of her parents.  The Titus sisters’ immigrant ancestors arrived in Massachusetts Bay on the Hopewell in 1635, and helped settle Rehoboth, Massachusetts, in 1643.  Robert Titus was banished to Long Island in 1654, [2] but his descendants stayed in Rehoboth until the American Revolution. [3]

Titus’ great-great-grandfather received a land grant in Moriah township, [4] New York, for his service in the Revolution. [5]  The land is mountainous, with about an eight of it arable. [6]  His son, Titus’ great-grandfather, invested his profits from peddling into a store, [7] which his son, Edwin, continued. [8]

The population of Moriah Township increased in the 1880s, probably from logging and mining. [9]  May’s father, Homer, was born in 1871, as the boom began, but Edwin died in 1876 when he still was a boy. [10]  Homer entered Syracuse University at age 23, and pledged Delta Upsilon, but left after his sophomore year. [11]

Her father was ordained a deacon in 1898, [12] the year he married Cora Elma Powlesland. [13]  He was posted to Peru, New York, where Julia Pauline was born in 1905. [14]  May Louise was born there on 30 November 1909, [15] when Cora was 35-years-old. [16]

The Tituses moved to Warrensburg and Keesville when May was a toddler.  Then, when she was seven-years-old, they moved to Troy in 1917. [17]  This was more than a change of school and playmates.  The areas in the green Adirondack Park is in the North County linguistic district.  Troy is in the fringe of the Hudson Valley Core dialect region. [18]

Homer was pastor in an Albany church in 1921, then became superintendent of the Northern District of the Troy Conference in 1923, and of the Central District in 1924 when May was 14.  The year she graduated from high school he went back to Troy. [19]  During this time, Julia was attending New York State College for Teachers in Albany. [20]

May enrolled at Syracuse University in 1928, [21] where she joined the Preacher’s Kids Club. [22]  The next year, she pledged Phi Mu, [23] a sorority that had been founded at Wesleyan College in Macon, Georgia. [24]  At the same time, Julia went to the Hartford Seminary in Connecticut for a missionary study course. [25]

The economy crashed in October 1929, and May did not return to Syracuse for her junior year.  Instead, a year later, in 1931, she entered Hartford where her course work were related to the Bible and teaching. [26]

During May’s second year, Julia went to Jacksonville, Florida, to teach mathematics at a Methodist school for African-American girls. [27]  Nothing more appeared in May’s official biography until after her mother died in 1942, after a long illness.  May then was working as the director of religious education for the First Methodist Church in Schenectady. [28]

A year later, the 33-year-old woman accepted a position as minister of education with the First Presbyterian Church in Poughkeepsie. [29]  After her move, May joined the Zonta Club, and served on the “Flowers and Fellowship” committee in 1944. [30]  The service club first was organized in Buffalo in 1919, and spread through upstate New York, before evolving into a national group modeled on the Lions Club. [31]

Homer retired in 1944 at age 73, [32] and married a woman living in Moriah Township in November 1945. [33]  The next year, May was hired by the Methodist Church’s Interboard Committee on Missionary Education in Nashville. [34]

Her work probably included a great deal of office work that passes unnoted. [35]  When her name appeared in the Nashville newspaper, it was for speeches or meetings being publicized by the church.  These reflected more the interests of the Church than her activities.

After World War II, as was mentioned in the post for 11 October 2020, the church sponsored teams of college students who moved in caravans across the country to help local churches.  In 1946, Titus was the instructor in “world friendship and community service” at the training sessions in Iowa. [36]

In the early 1950s, the church held national convocations on youth, often at Purdue University.  Titus went to them in 1950, [37] 1951, [38] and 1952.  The goal of the last was “fashioning a four-year program for various age brackets.” [39]

The church changed focus as the Cold War dominated politics, [40] and began sponsoring meetings in Washington that included one college student from each state.  One seminar a year was devoted to Christian Citizenship, the other to the United Nations. [41]  Titus attended meetings in 1954, [42] 1956 [43], and 1959. [44]

Technically, Titus was paid by Women’s Division of Christian Service, which held a subordinate position after the formation of The Methodist Church in 1939.  Previously, a number of women’s groups had founded institutions like the Allen School.  Jane Donovan said the Women’s Division “maintained its own fund-raising, financial control, program generation, children’s and youth programs, and its own independent mission institutions, including its own missionaries” [45]

That ended in 1964, when the General Conference eliminated “the entire home and foreign mission departments of the Woman’s Division” and transferred supervision to the male dominated board. [46]  In a 1962 report, Titus noted the transition was beginning, [47] and that “the positive and rewarding aspects far outnumber the moments of discouragement” in developing a new curriculum. [48]

Titus’ name appeared less often in the Nashville paper after 1962.  In addition to changes in the church, Nashville and the surrounding Davidson County was growing by almost 25% a decade. [49]  As its readership became more suburban, [50] The Tennessean’s reporting would have changed.

In 1965, Titus worked on a revived sort of Caravan project to send groups of youth and adults to poor areas in the country, including inner cities of Los Angeles, Chicago, and Detroit; Appalachia; French-speaking parts of Louisiana, and “Latin Americans in Texas.” [51]

More changes occurred after the 1968 merger with the Evangelical United Brethren that produced The United Methodist Church. [52]  However, Titus survived the various reorganizations.  In 1972, she was the Nashville contact for youth programs in the Mississippi Conference. [53]

May turned 66 in late 1974, and probably retired.  Her name disappeared from the public record.  Not even an obituary has been found.

Graphics
1.  Base map: Jackaranga.  “Adirondack Park” (in green).  Wikimedia Commons.  December 2007; last updated by Daniel Case on 11 December 2007.  Red circles are where Homer Titus worked; blue circles are where May Titus worked.

2. A photograph of May Titus in college appears on the Photos K tab.  One with her sister and father appears in the post for 4 November 2011.  A later one appears in the “Legends” article.

End Notes
1.  Claire Lennon is discussed in five posts from 18 October 2020 through 28 October 2020.

2.  Leo Joseph Titus Jr.  Titus—A North American Family History.  Baltimore, Maryland: Gateway Press, 2004.  5–6.  Cited by Wikipedia.  “Robert Titus.”

3.  Carolyn L. Thompson.  “Descendants of Silas Titus.”  Genealogy website.

4.  A number of hamlets exist in Moriah township including Moriah, Moriah Center, South Moriah, and Port Henry.  I’m going to refer to the township to keep things simple.

5.  Carol Darling.  “Russel L Titus.”  Find a Grave website.  11 February 2014.
6.  “Welcome to Moriah, NY.”  In and Around the Adirondack Park website.
7.  Darling, Russel Titus.
8.  Carol Darling.  “Edwin Bristol Titus.”  Find a Grave website.   24 April 2015.
9.  Wikipedia.  “Moriah, New York.”
10.  Darling, Edwin Titus.

11.  Frank Smalley.  Alumni Record and General Catalogue of Syracuse University, 1872-1910.  Syracuse, New York: Alumni Association of Syracuse University, 1911.  2095.

12.  Homer F. Titus.  Obituary.  The [Troy, New York] Times Record.  4 August 1958.  Posted by Stephen Payne to “Rev Homer Fuller Titus.”  Find a Grave website.  11 November 2012.

13.  W. B. Osborne.  “Rev. Homer F. Titus.”  Prominent People of the Capital District.  Albany, New York: Fort Orange Recording Bureau, 1923.  165.

14.  Stephen Payne.  “Julia Pauline Titus.”  Find a Grave website.  11 November 2012.
15.  “May Louise Titus.”  Mormon’s FamilySearch website.

16.  Stephen Payne.  “Cora Powlesland Titus.”  Find a Grave website.  11 November 2012.
17.  Homer Titus, obituary.

18.  Aaron J. Dinkin.  “Dialect Boundaries and Phonological Change in Upstate New York.”  PhD dissertation.  University of Pennsylvania, 2009.  430.

19.  Homer Titus, obituary.

20.  Julia P. Titus.  Obituary.  Asheville [North Carolina] Citizen-Times.  29 July 1990.  20.  It did not give dates for her degrees or employment history.

21.  Syracuse is in a third dialect region, the Inland North Core. [54]

22.  Onondagan.  Syracuse University yearbook, 1929.  Edited by William A. Swallow.  403.

23.  Onondagan.  Syracuse University yearbook, 1930.  Edited by Edward C. Reifenstein Jr.  320.

24.  “Faithful Sisters, Since 1852.”  Phi Mu website.

25.  “Party for Miss Titus.”  Rutland [Vermont] Daily Herald.  21 September 1929.  1.  Homer was assigned to a Methodist church in Rutland from 1929 to 1931. [55]

26.  “May L. Titus.  Summary of her courses, 1931–1933.”  Hartford Seminary.  Compiled 10 November 1964.  Copy provided by the registrar.

27.  “Boylan-Haven School.”  50–51 in Methodist Episcopal Church.  The Women’s Home Missionary Society.  Annual Report for 1932–1933.  Cincinnati, Ohio: The Women’s Home Missionary Society.  51.

28.  “Mrs. Homer F. Titus.”  Obituary.  The [Troy, New York] Times Record.  4 August 1958.  Posted by Stephen Payne to “Cora Powlesland Titus.”  Find a Grave website.  11 November 2012.  Cora died in Moriah Center, where Homer had been a pastor between 1934 and 1938.  He then worked for the Board of Stewards, [56] which may have allowed him to spend time in Moriah.

29.  “Miss Titus to Become Poughkeepsie Minister of Education.”  The [Schenectady, New York] Gazette.  19 June 1943.

30.  Item.  Poughkeepsie [New York] Journal.  16 May 1944.  10.
31.  Wikipedia.  “Zonta International.”
32.  Homer Titus, obituary.

33.  Jean McGregor.  Item in “Tea Table Chat.”  The [Saratoga Springs, New York] Saratogian.  29 November 1945.

34.  May L. Titus.  “Biographical Sketch.”  The United Methodist Church Archives and History Center at Drew University, Madison, New Jersey.  Copy provided by Frances Lyons, Reference Archivist.

35.  The only published work by Titus that has survived is Youth and Mission.  New York: Abingdon-Cokesbury Press, 1949.  The adolescent textbook is 48 pages long and has five chapters: “Why?,” “Let’s Act, Now!,” “Giving,” “Working in the Missions in My Church,” and “Relations to Other Agencies.”

36.  “Youth Caravan Training At Morningside.”  The [Morningside College] Morningsider 4:3:June 1946.

37.  Item.  The [Nashville] Tennessean.  22 August 1950.  21.  Larry Eisenberg was one of the attendees.

38.  “Church Group Leaves Aug. 2.”  The [Nashville] Tennessean.  17 August 1951.  11.  Larry Eisenberg was one of the attendees.

39.  “Nashvillians At Youth Parley.”  The [Nashville] Tennessean.  22 August 1952.  42.  Larry Eisenberg was one of the attendees.

40.  As mentioned in the post for 9 February 2020, Eisenberg left the Youth Department in 1952 when the church changed the focus of the department.

41.  Nashville dateline.  “Christian Citizenship Seminar of MSM and UN Seminar of MYF To Have Over 100.”  The Louisiana Methodist 11:310:5 February 1959.

42.  “Nashvillians To Hear Lippmann at Seminar.”  The [Nashville] Tennessean.  17 February 1954.  Wallace Chappell also attended from Nashville.  As mentioned in the post for 9 February 2020, he replace Eisenberg in the Youth Department.

43.  “Midstate Methodists To Attend Conference.”  The [Nashville] Tennessean.  24 August 1956.  27.

44.  Louisiana Methodist.

45.  Jane Donovan.  “But Gideon Refused: The Institutionalization of Methodist Mission.”  The American Religious Experience website.  Julia, and the rest of the faculty of the Allen School, also were employees of the Women’s Division.

46.  Donovan.

47.  The transition apparently began in 1962, and was ratified by the quadrennial conference of the church in 1964.

48.  Hazel Corbell.  “Youth Work.”  118–119 in The Methodist Church, Woman’s Division of Christian Service of the Board of Missions and Church Extension.  Annual Report for 1 June 1961 to 31 May 1962.  New York: The Methodist Church, 1963.  119.

49.  The population of Davidson County increased 25.1% between 1940 and 1950, and another 24.2% between 1950 and 1960. [57]

50.  While the population of Davidson County was growing dramatically, the population of Nashville increased only 4.1% between 1940 and 1950, and declined 2% between 1950 and 1960.  In 1963, the city and county merged into a single unit. [58]

51.  May Titus.  Letter to Family and Friends.  Christmas 1965.  Typed, mimeographed.  Copy of one in the files of Hartford Seminary that was provided by the registrar.

52.  Wikipedia.  “United Methodist Church.”

53.  The Untied Methodist Church, Southeastern Jurisdiction.  Mississippi Conference Journal.  1972.  69.

54.  Dinkin.
55.  Homer Titus, obituary.
56.  Homer Titus, obituary.
57.  Wikipedia.  “Davidson County, Tennessee.”
58.  Wikipedia.  “Nashville, Tennessee.”