Historic Rural Churches
PHOTOGRAPHY BY RANDALL D AVIS , S COT T FARRAR, J OHN KIRKL AND , SCOT T
MACINNIS & STEVE ROBINSON. STORY BY SONNY SEALS
B
ack in 2012 I wrote a story for Georgia Backroads
about my family roots and the small village of
Powelton. The theme of my article was discovery:
discovery of my heritage, discovery of Powelton and, more
importantly, discovery of a new way to appreciate Georgia history. Since that fateful day, life has dramatically changed for
me and my lifelong friend, George Hart, in ways that were
impossible to foresee. It’s funny how life does that sometimes.
I met George Hart in 1960, when I was a student at
Georgia Tech and he was a student at Emory. Over the years,
George has given me many gifts, one of which is a passion for
bluegrass music. Another is a love of Georgia’s back roads and
the history that goes with it.
George and I have been periodically riding the back roads
of the state for years, with no other motivation than the sheer
joy of discovery. Just jostling along those lonely byways to see
what was around the next curve was exciting in a strange and
exotic sort of way . . . old towns that had virtually disappeared,
farmhouses that were falling down, cemeteries covered in
weeds, the decay of an agrarian way of life that seemed so distant and yet so near.
We thought at some point we would get it out of our system, but the more we learned about Georgia’s unique beginnings, the more fascinating it became.
To make a long story short, on one of those trips I discovered my great-grandfather’s resting place in an old graveyard in
the lee of an aging and inactive church in the village of
Powelton. Powelton is set in what is today a secluded nook
about 60 miles west of Augusta. But I could tell that it had
once been a thriving community. There was a main street kind
of feel to it with a single road running the length of the old
town, but there remain today just a few old houses with kudzu
running through the windows and a little store that has been
closed for decades. Other than these, the only significant surviving structures are a Baptist church at one end of town and
a Methodist church at the other, only a few hundred yards
apart.
The historical marker outside the Baptist church notes that
it was organized in 1786 and that Jesse Mercer, one of the
founders of the Baptist denomination in Georgia, used to
preach there. Obviously this had been an important village two
hundred years ago.
Antioch Baptist, Taliaferro County, by Scott Farrar
HISTORIC RURAL CHURCHES POINTS OF INTEREST
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George and I wanted to understand more
about what happened in this part of Georgia over
the last two centuries. We wondered about the lost
village of Powelton. Why was it there in the first
place and why did it disappear?
We were just as curious to learn more about the
beautiful but deserted Methodist church. Who
owned it now? Who was taking care of it? What
was going to happen to it? And we wondered how
our society could let an historic and beautiful
sanctuary like this one collapse and disappear.
Apple Valley Baptist, Jackson County, by Scott MacInnis
The answers to questions like these formed the
cornerstone of our early plans for Historic Rural
Churches of Georgia. In 2013, George and I started a website
Oconee, then the Ocmulgee, then the Flint, and finally the
(www.hrcga.org) to find out if other people cared about these
Chattahoochee. By 1832 the state’s modern footprint was
icons of our rural past as much as we did.
complete and the Native American lands had vanished. The
Well, we have our answer…you do. HRCGA now has ten
state was governed by the county system which, in 1832, convolunteer photographers across the state documenting this hissisted of 90 counties. It is interesting to note that, within this
tory for HRCGA’s website. A book to be published by the
same footprint, Georgia today has 159 counties.
University of Georgia Press will be on the market in August of
Having acquired this massive expanse, the Georgia legislathis year. And we have several other media initiatives underway.
ture had to decide what to do with it. The state ultimately used
In the last three years, we have discovered that Georgia has
two unique methods to dole out its real estate. One was the
an abundance of old rural churches, and we now have some
Headright System, which granted land to settlers according to
sense of how this came to be. After the American Revolution,
the number of persons in the immediate family, including slaves.
Georgia consisted of about 30,000 inhabitants (half white,
The second was the Lottery System, which parceled out land in
half black) clustered along the Savannah River and in the
increments (from 40- to 400-acre land lots) based on drawings,
coastal region. The rest of what we now know as Georgia,
with preference given to veterans (or widows and orphans of vetabout 35 million acres, was occupied by the Creek people in
erans) of the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812.
the south and the Cherokee in the north. The state began to
Thus Georgia was settled by mostly by white, land-hungry
“acquire” this land via a series of treaties that proceeded west,
Europeans, with cheap land given out in small parcels to tough
river basin by river basin, over a period of less than 50 years.
pioneers and ex-soldiers willing to come in and work it. And
First the Ogeechee River was the western frontier, then the
that’s where the rural churches came into play.
Powelton Methodist, Hancock County,
by Scott Farrar
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Carswell Grove Baptist,
Jenkins County, by
John Kirkland
GEORGIA BACKROADS / SUMMER 2016
Cedar Grove Methodist, Tattnall County, by Randall Davis
Apart from the residents of Savannah and Augusta, the
inhabitants of frontier Georgia seldom participated in organized religion until after the Revolution. Few early Georgians
had embraced the Church of England, and after independence
few had an affinity for any form of religion tied to Europe or
a hierarchical structure. This changed with the Great
Awakening, a movement that swept the American South,
including Georgia, between 1790 and 1830, establishing a
more democratic form of Christianity modeled after the
Christian communities of the New Testament.
First the Baptists, and then the Methodists, won the hearts and
minds of the early Georgia pioneers as these two denominations
came to dominate the rural countryside. The histories of the older
churches reveal that, in the rapidly emerging backcountry, the
church was the center of everything. They were usually the first
communal institutions established in a newly settled area. The
town buildings, the county court system, and everything else followed. In the absence of other civil and municipal institutions, the
church provided spiritual comfort, social structure, unity, and
basic law and order in an immense wilderness populated by a
diverse group of rugged, independent, small landowners.
Many of Georgia’s rural communities have diminished
greatly over time for a variety of reasons. The state has evolved
from a frontier wilderness completely rooted in rural agrarian
enterprise to one dominated by its urban areas. The rural
church was always the center of its community, but a combination of declining congregations and lack of funding have put
many of the old buildings at risk.
Many rural churches are well maintained and have active
congregations. But a substantial number have been abandoned
or neglected as Georgia has transitioned from its rural heritage.
HRCGA believes that some of these old treasures in crisis
can be renovated or repurposed in a way that will again bring
rural communities together. We have found that three key elements must be in place in order to save a historic church in a
state of abandonment and neglect: (1) a strong local group that
wants to save the structure, (2) basic funding for critical repairs
and renovation, and (3) an ongoing use that ensures its owners or caretakers will attend to stewardship and maintenance.
Of these three, the presence of a strong local leadership that
HISTORIC RURAL CHURCHES POINTS OF INTEREST
Philippi Primitive Baptist, Schley County, by Steve Robinson
wants to save a church is the most important item. With that
in place, there are solutions to the other challenges.
Sometimes, private individuals or groups rescue an at-risk rural
church building and resume regular services. In other instances,
these grand old buildings have been repurposed for community
uses like a meeting hall, gathering place, periodic artistic performances, wedding chapels, concert halls, and gallery space.
Of course, the issue of funding is always a key challenge,
but technology is providing potential solutions that were not
available a few years ago. The internet and social networking
allow people to get involved in the process in many ways.
Today’s buzz word is “crowd sourcing,” which can apply to
money, labor, or materials raised for a worthy project.
For the long term preservation of a rural church, an annual maintenance fund must be generated at the local level, ideally to establish a small maintenance endowment. For
instance, church graveyards require regular maintenance, and
descendants of those buried there often respond to meet this
need. Again, technology may provide a potential solution in
the form of planned giving and the ability to locate church
descendants for support. There is financial power in genealogy, and today’s technology allows us to access it.
I began this article with discovery and would like to end
with it, too. There are many old churches across Georgia that
are at risk, but it is not inevitable that they will ultimately face
ruin. There are solutions, and we have seen many renovation
success stories across the state. We encourage local communities to discover and embrace the old sanctuaries and to look for
solutions to save them.
Please join us at Historic Rural Churches of Georgia
(www.hrcga.org) as we carry out our mission of researching,
documenting, and preserving these rural treasures. Take the
journey with us as we look at Georgia history through the lenses of her rural churches. We love Georgia’s back roads for a
good reason: most of us have deep roots in rural sections of the
state. That is where we came from and how we got here.
Sonny Seals, along with George Hart, founded HRCGA in 2013.
Sonny is the Managing Director of Eton Partners, a retained executive search firm located in Atlanta.
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