The Hopewell Church Restoration Project

Welcome to
Mount Willing

In rural Lowndes County, Alabama, the small community of Mt. Willing is home to a rare treasure: an antebellum church building largely unchanged from when it was constructed in the early 1840s. This plain but dignified structure, which once housed the Hopewell Baptist Church, was built by skilled enslaved carpenters at the behest of its founding pastor, the Reverend David Lee, who was also a planter and slaveholder.

Such buildings are increasingly scarce. The tall but otherwise modest one-story, one-room gable-front structure, about 35 by 60 feet in dimension, was framed with hand-hewn heart pine timbers and locally-sawn boards. It still contains its original tall paneled doors and wide-plank floors and pews—although, sadly, its rifted roof shingles and hand-molded brick piers have long since been replaced with modern materials

The church reflects the simple meetinghouse style favored in the mid-18th century by the New Light or Separate Baptists. This group, led by prominent frontier evangelists such as Daniel Marshall, Martha Stearns Marshall, and Shubal Stearns, grew out of the Great Awakening and spread throughout the South. Later, the Separate Baptists united with the Regular Baptists and, in time, they were all simply called Southern Baptists.
Such meetinghouses, like other similar churches in the reformed tradition, were intentionally austere and plain. The congregations that built them mistrusted ecclesiastical ornament and declined even to display crosses or steeples on their churches. Their worship services focused on the Word itself, as received directly by the members, rather than on elaborate liturgies or lavishly decorated altars, chancels, and communion rails. As the 19th century progressed, these meetinghouses were replicated across the south as members moved west in search of new land. But, in time, as Baptist churches grew wealthier and architectural styles grew more elaborate, fewer were built in the meetinghouse style.

Unfortunately, because of their plain, unadorned form, churches constructed in this manner are especially vulnerable to being misunderstood, overlooked, or undervalued. For example, similar antebellum Baptist churches founded near the Hopewell church—Town Creek (constituted in 1820 in Dallas County) and Ash Creek (constituted in 1833 in Lowndes County)—were at some point torn down for salvage, as was the Big Stevens’ Creek Baptist Church, built in 1776 in the Edgefield District in South Carolina, after which these churches likely were modeled. Hopewell is the only such structure that is extant today within the bounds of the Alabama Association, an important group of early Baptist churches located in Alabama’s Black Belt.

Big Stevens Creek Baptist Church, founded by Separate Baptist evangelist Daniel Marshall in 1762 and built in 1776 in North Augusta, SC (formerly Hamburg), in the Edgefield District. Big Stevens Creek was the model for the Town Creek Baptist Church in Dallas County, AL. Both churches have been torn down. Photo by Margaret Stringer Lambert.

The antebellum Ash Creek Baptist Church, a meetinghouse style church in Gordonsville, Lowndes County. The church was torn down for salvage.

The design of these early Baptist churches was strongly democratic, anti-hierarchical, and egalitarian, closely aligned with the republican spirit that led to the American Revolution. However, by the early to mid-19th century, many such churches—heirs to a movement that, at its inception, had welcomed Black members on relatively equal terms—contained a contradiction to this democratic ethic embedded within the churches’ architecture: slave galleries (that is, balconies used to segregate Black members during worship) or, in some cases, partitioned spaces that separated white from enslaved church members on the main floor.

According to documentary sources, the Hopewell Church in Mt. Willing at one time included such a slave gallery. Although this was removed at some point, and its exact location and construction are still unknown, the Hopewell Church Project recently has discovered architectural evidence of segregated seating—most likely, a slave section railed off in what used to be the rear of the building—during our restoration. Although slave galleries still survive in some other Alabama churches, it is exceedingly rare to find undisturbed physical evidence of racially-partitioned seating on the main floor of an antebellum Baptist church in Alabama (or elsewhere), such as that found at Hopewell.

Slavery, the Hopewell Baptist Church, and the Alabama Association

In the antebellum and Civil War era, membership at the Hopewell Baptist Church never exceeded 224 persons, but the church played a critical role within the Alabama Association—which, in turn, was a primary supporter of and advocate for slavery in Alabama.

The Alabama Association was a group of Baptist churches that included, at various times, some 30 to 40 antebellum churches spread across the prosperous cotton kingdom of the Black Belt. The Association stretched from Prattville and Wetumpka in the north, to Greenville in the south, and from parts of Macon County in the east, to parts of Wilcox County in the west, encompassing most of Montgomery, Lowndes, and Dallas counties. It was the most powerful Baptist association in the state in an age when the church was a dominant force in social and political life.

David Lee, Jr., of Mt. Willing, AL, youngest child of Rev. David Lee Sr., born about 1846. No image exists of his father, born 1805 in Johnson County, NC.

The plantation home of Rev. David Lee and his wife, Mary Eleanor Coleman, in Mt. Willing, Lowndes County, before it was torn down.

In the mid- to late 19th century, Reverend David Lee led the Alabama Association as its moderator for almost 40 years. He was also a prominent preacher who at various times pastored at least five churches within the association—Hopewell (Mt. Willing), Benton (Benton), Ash Creek (Gordonsville), New Bethel (Braggs), and Good Hope (Manningham)—and acted as a supply preacher for others. He led frequent revivals, called “protracted meetings” by Baptists, all across the Association, and he often participated in constituting new churches, ordaining ministers and missionaries, and baptizing members, both white and Black, within the growing Baptist denomination. He held important leadership roles in the Alabama Baptist Convention, and contributed many articles to the influential denominational newspaper.

And, like virtually all of his contemporaries who led Baptist churches in the area, Reverend Lee supported the enslavement of African-Americans—and believed that God did as well. He also owned slaves himself, operating a 1,100-acre cotton plantation just a few miles from the church which was worked by 25 enslaved persons, a large number for an Alabama planter (the typical slaveholder owned fewer than five slaves), and particularly for a Baptist preacher. Hopewell Baptist, Reverend Lee’s home church, had as many as 80 enslaved members—versus 144 white members—in 1865, when the Civil War ended.

The Southern church’s support for slavery in the mid-19th century has been well-documented by scholars, but it is not widely known or acknowledged outside of the academy. Blacks became members of Baptist and other protestant churches in great numbers between 1845 and 1860, yet it was largely white Southern preachers who constructed and promulgated the South's justification of slavery.

The Southern church’s support for slavery in the mid-19th century has been well-documented by scholars.

The Baptist denomination’s own newspaper, and the Alabama Baptist Convention itself, enthusiastically took up the cause and were ardently committed to slavery, secession and the Rebel flag. Indeed, “[f]rom 1830 to the end of the Civil War, the most vigorous defense of slavery issued from Southern pulpits.”

This campaign was extraordinarily consequential; the 1845 split between northern and southern churches, which was directly fueled by such sentiments, is acknowledged as “the rehearsal for bitter disputes that precipitated secession in 1860.” Reverend David Lee represented Alabama as one of its only 14 delegates to the 1845 meeting in Augusta, Georgia that divided the Baptist denomination over slavery.

Other white pastors who worked with Lee in the same association, which “dominated state Baptist life,” included Basil Manly and Isaac Tichenor, who preached at what is now the First Baptist Church in Montgomery; became, respectively, presidents of the University of Alabama and Auburn University; and staunchly supported slavery and secession at this time. Indeed, Rev. Basil Manly commenced Jefferson Davis’ inauguration as president of the Confederacy by offering an invocation.

These ministers, in turn, exercised considerable influence with politically powerful Baptist parishioners such as Thomas Hill Watts, the Confederate Attorney General and Civil War governor of Alabama, who was baptized by David Lee; and William Parish Chilton, Chief Justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, a member of the provisional and regular Congress of the Confederacy, and President of the Baptist State Convention. Along with other pivotal figures connected with the Alabama Association such as J. L. M. Curry, A. W. Chambliss, and C. F. Sturgis, these pastors vigorously proclaimed God’s support for human bondage and for the “proper” relations between master and slave from the pulpit and in publication. As Tichenor summarized the widespread consensus of his colleagues, “That slavery is sanctioned by the Bible seems scarcely to admit of doubt … [I]t stands as an institution of God.”

Enslaved Members of Alabama Association Churches, Shown in Church Records

Yet white Baptists did not exclude enslaved Blacks from church membership; they ardently sought to convert them. Reverend Lee was a leader of this movement within the Alabama Association, frequently appealing to his brethren for funds to support missions to enslaved persons, and even serving for some years as a missionary himself. His motives were likely mixed, combining those of preacher and slaveholder. On the one hand, he exhorted fellow Baptists to address the “spiritual wants” of bondsmen, asking in the denominational newspaper, “Shall our slave population be suffered, by our neglect, to live in darkness and to die in sin?” On the other, he likely shared the prevailing view among white Baptists that religious conversion promoted social control, and that a Christian slave was, in fact, a better slave—i.e., one who was less rebellious, more content and compliant, and preferably grateful to have been redeemed by whites from his uncivilized African ways.
The campaign to evangelize enslaved persons was so successful—not the least because many Blacks themselves saw certain real advantages in church membership—that in a considerable number of antebellum Baptist churches in the Black Belt, African-American members soon far outnumbered whites. In 1860, just before the Civil War, a number of prominent Alabama Association churches had many more Black than white members—for example, First Baptist Montgomery had 270 white members and 409 Black members; Shiloh, in Sardis, had 21 white members and 311 Black members; and Elim, in Mt. Meigs, had 26 white members and 280 Black members. In the Alabama Association as a whole, Blacks actually outnumbered whites in 1860 by 2,844 to 2,066. Enslaved African-American Baptists worshipped, and also engaged in significant acts of resistance, for as much as 30-40 years in such mixed-race churches during the antebellum, Civil War, and immediate postbellum periods prior to leaving to form their own churches. This important part of Black religious and social history is far too-little recognized.
In the white-dominated antebellum churches, Black Baptists generally were restricted from preaching, serving as deacons, voting in conference, or forming their own churches, and sometimes even barred from attendance. They were listed on membership rolls without last names, and instead designated, for example, as “Fanny, servant of Col Hayne Rose,” or “Steven svt. T. Dunklin.” They were disciplined with exclusion from the church for offenses of resistance such as running away, stealing food, and disobeying overseers and owners. They were compelled to participate in worship services in segregated seating, either in slave galleries or in separate sections railed off at the rear of the church. Sometimes they had to worship standing up or sitting on the floor. Sometimes they could observe services only from outdoors in the church yard.
Despite such restrictions, enslaved African-Americans shaped, changed, and contributed in extraordinary ways to early Baptist practice and also vigorously urged their own autonomy. They swelled the numbers of the movement, and persisted in their faith in the face of every difficulty. They brought constant petitions before these churches to preach, pray, and act as deacons themselves, or otherwise participate actively in church life, and often succeeded. In a some cases, they were able to secure their own separate church services and conferences, even before emancipation.
Image: An excerpt from a typed transcription of the membership list at Centre Ridge Baptist Church in Carlowville. Lowndes County. The list shows the first names of “Black Members” and, in an adjacent column, designates each enslaved member as the “Servant of” an individual slaveholder.

When their interests were thwarted, or their preferred style of worship disallowed, they turned to baptizing and preaching without permission, holding secret religious meetings in brush arbors in the woods, and unsanctioned gatherings in the Quarters with wash pots at the door to deaden noise. If enslaved members in biracial churches disliked the sermon or the Sunday School lesson—which more often than not was designed merely to remind them that the Bible said to obey their masters—they voted with their feet, or, if that was not an option, with their inattention. Although invariably poor, they gave money for missions, and won respect from whites, albeit sometimes grudging, for their extraordinary devotion and remarkable skills in preaching, singing, and leadership. Despite all the obstacles, they achieved for themselves a level of dignity, equality, and authority within the church, through their own determined efforts, that was denied to them elsewhere.

Ultimately, when slavery ended, African-American Baptists led an exodus en masse to autonomous Black churches free of white domination. In 1868, Hopewell had 164 white and 74 African-American members; five years later, no Black members remained. Indeed, the Alabama Association complained in its 1868 report that, “Letters from several of the churches speak of the difficulty of ascertaining where many of their colored members are; their general neglect of the regular meetings of the church, the impossibility of exercising proper discipline over them, and a strong and growing disposition to a separate organization.” By this time, Black Baptists were beginning to depart in great numbers from the mixed-race churches. Some were able to secure white support for their own new churches—in the form of donated land, or gifts or sales of unwanted buildings—despite whites’ clear preference that Blacks remain in biracial churches where they could continue to be overseen and instructed. Other new Black congregations had to go it completely alone.

Such churches “immediately became the central institution within the black community. Pastors emerged not only as religious leaders but also as social and civic leaders.” In later years, it was these churches that sparked the civil rights movement in Alabama—including the Montgomery bus boycott, led by Black churches that split from a white-dominated church within the very Alabama Association once led by Reverend Lee. Thereafter, Black churches thrived despite white pastors’ emphatic predictions to the contrary. Indeed, in many instances, the white churches from which African-American Baptists in the Alabama Association departed in the late 19th century are now defunct, and it is the Black churches that have survived.