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Cape Fear Baptist Church, located in southern Cumberland County near the boundary with Bladen County, from its beginnings in the mid-eighteenth century was associated with that sect of the denomination known as Particular Baptists. In brief, they were Calvinists, believing only the “elect,” that is, particular individuals, would be saved. From all indications Cape Fear is among the oldest, if not the oldest, Particular Baptist congregation in the state. Only the Jersey Church of the Yadkin River, also begun in 1756 but broken up by the Cherokee uprising four years later, was as old.
Cape Fear Baptist Church was established (or constituted, by the denomination’s terminology) in January 1756. Several sources, including Baptist history scholar George Washington Paschal, date worship at the site prior to 1756. Paschal’s authority is the work of Morgan Edwards (1722-1795). Edwards, a Delaware Baptist, collected materials with the intent of writing histories of the Baptists in each of the colonies. His notes on North Carolina (a “poor and unhappy . . . wretched province,” by his reckoning), prepared in 1772, set the date prior to 1756. It was in that year that mention of Cape Fear first appeared in the records of the Charleston Association.
Cape Fear’s mother church, Welsh Neck Baptist on the Pee Dee River in South Carolina, was constituted in 1738. At some point thereafter, settlers moved northward to the Cape Fear and in time founded the new congregation. Stephen Hollingsworth (died 1772), the first pastor at Cape Fear, received a land grant in the area in 1735. Hollingsworth is said by Paschal to “have had no little part in winning General Baptist preachers of North Carolina to Calvinism.” The original church building was replaced in 1859 by the present structure located one-fourth mile north of the original site.
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G. W. Paschal, “Morgan Edwards’ Materials Towards a History of the Baptist in the Province of North Carolina,” North Carolina Historical Review (July 1930): 365-399
G. W. Paschal, History of North Carolina Baptists, 2 vols. (1930-1955)
National Register of Historic Places nomination (1984)
Historical Sketch of Welsh Neck Baptist Church (1988)
The History of Cape Fear Baptist Church (1990)
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