INTRODUCTION OF BAPTIST SENTIMENTS INTO THE STATE.
| In 1733, one or two Baptists arrived on the boat with James Oglethorpe: William Calvert, a lay preacher, and his wife, who might have shared his faith. Others soon followed, totaling probably fewer than 140 by 1770. In 1772 the first continuing Baptist church, Kiokee near Appling, was founded; twelve years later the first Baptist association in the state, the Georgia Association, appeared. As the new century opened, there were about 4,700 Baptists, gathered in 72 churches, with 3 district associations that included 90 percent of the total Baptist population. When the new nation was formed in 1776, about .52 percent of all Georgians were Baptist. In 1800 the figure stood at about 3 percent.[1] |
THE first account we have of any Baptists in the province of Georgia was in the year 1757. Mr. Nicholas Bedgewood, who was employed in the capacity of agent to Mr. Whitfield's Orphan House, near Savannah, had several years previously been convinced of the truth of Baptist sentiments. In that year he went over to Charleston, and was baptized by Rev. Mr. Hart, the pastor of the Baptist church in that city. He was soon licensed to preach, and his ordination to the ministry took place in 1759. In 1763, he baptized several persons in and about the Orphan House, one of whom was Mr. Benjamin Stirk, who afterwards became a minister of the gospel. To these persons, who were probably a branch of the Charleston church, Mr. Bedgewood administered the Lord's Supper, the first Baptist communion ever held in the province.
Mr. Stirk, having lost his wife while at the Orphan House, married the mother of the late Rev. Thomas Polhill, of Newington, in the vicinity of Goshen, eighteen miles above Savannah, to which place he removed in 1767.
He appears to have been a man of good learning, fine natural parts, and eminent for piety and zeal. As there was no Baptist church in Georgia, he united with the church at Euhaw, S. C. He soon began to preach, and set up places of meeting, at his own house, and at Tuckaseeking, twenty miles higher up the country, where there were a few Baptists, and who constituted a branch of the Euhaw church. But of the useful labors of this faithful servant of Christ, they were soon deprived, as he was called to his reward in the year 1770. This was the second bud of a Baptist church in the State; indeed, it is not certainly known that they ever became a regular church.
In the meantime, Mr. Botsford, a young licentiate of the Charleston church, while on a visit to the Euhaw church, received an invitation to come over and help this feeble and destitute branch. Encouraged by the mother church, and accompanied by the pastor, Rev. Mr. Pelot, he came and preached to them his first sermon, on the 27th of June, 1771. His labors being highly acceptable, he yielded to their solicitations, and remained with them for more than a year. But his anxious spirit would not permit him to remain in one place. He traveled extensively, preaching in all the surrounding country ; and towards the close of the next year, he went still higher up the river, and commenced an establishment at what was at first called New Savannah, but now Botsford's Old Meeting-house, about twenty-five or thirty miles below Augusta. Here he had the pleasure of seeing the work of the Lord prosper in his hands.
