Abbott's Creek, North Carolina, Baptist Church ed. by J. Kristian Pratt (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Abbott’s Creek, North Carolina, Baptist Church ed. by J. Kristian Pratt
• Glenn Jonas

Abbott’s Creek, North Carolina, Baptist Church. Edited by J. Kristian Pratt. Baptists in Early North America Series. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 2023. Pp. cxxx, 258. $60.00, ISBN 978-0-88146-860-1.)

The Sandy Creek Baptist tradition, with its embrace of the religious enthusiasm from the First Great Awakening, left a significant imprint on the DNA of Baptists in the South. The Sandy Creek tradition traces its origin to several families who migrated south from Connecticut to Virginia and eventually to North Carolina, where they established the Sandy Creek Baptist Church in 1755. Led by itinerant preachers Shubal Stearns, Daniel Marshall, and Marshall’s wife, Martha Stearns Marshall (Shubal’s sister), the movement grew rapidly, stretching from the Carolinas northward into Virginia and southward into Georgia. Within three years, the mother church had helped establish the Sandy Creek Baptist Association. By the time of Shubal Stearns’s death in 1771, the movement boasted forty-two churches and 125 ministers.

Abbott’s Creek, North Carolina, Baptist Church is the ninth volume in the Baptists in Early North America Series, initiated by the late Baptist historian William H. Brackney. The series has been helpful for understanding the Baptist tradition in America through the lens of influential and historic local Baptist churches. Each volume in the series provides the historical context of the local congregation and then, significantly, an annotated presentation of the church’s records. These primary source materials provide a vital means for understanding Baptists from the perspective of the local congregation, an approach utilized by some historians over the last several decades.

The editor of this volume, J. Kristian Pratt, provides a helpful resource for historians seeking to understand the Sandy Creek tradition in Baptist life, a topic for which there is need for deeper research. Religion in the South, particularly of the Baptist stripe, cannot properly be understood without studying the Sandy Creek tradition. However, records from the original church are missing due to a fire in 1816. That is what makes this book so important. The Abbott’s Creek church, established within months of the original Sandy Creek church, provides an important glimpse into the broader Sandy Creek tradition.

In the first section of the book, Pratt provides an extensive and careful historical introduction to the Abbott’s Creek church. The fact that there are currently two churches—Abbott’s Creek Primitive Baptist Church and Abbott’s Creek Missionary Baptist Church—across the street from one another is itself an interesting part of the story. Pratt’s historical essay explains the split but provides so much more relevant information about the original church. In this section Pratt gives meticulous attention to defining terms relevant to the study at hand, such as Old Lights and New Lights, General Baptists and Particular Baptists, Regular Baptists and Separate Baptists, and Primitive [End Page 415] Baptists and Missionary Baptists. Pratt then proceeds to tell the story of the Abbott’s Creek church, setting it within the context of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century North Carolina history. The surviving church records make up the rest of the book. These records are the Church Minute Books of 1783–1836 and of 1818–1874 and 1886. An extensive bibliography and index are included, adding to the usefulness of this book to any researcher seeking to understand this element of the Baptist family.

This volume is designed for both lay and professional historians to have easy access to the records of this important Baptist congregation. Libraries, particularly university and public libraries in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Virginia, will want to purchase this work. It is essential for Baptist historians. Pratt is to be congratulated for this superb contribution to the historiography of the Baptist movement in America.

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