Samson Edmond is trying to track down the origins of his church.
The lifelong Golden Triangle resident has attended Prairie Hill Missionary Baptist Church most of his life, like much of his family before him. The cemetery where members of his family are buried is just down the road from the church, and his uncle, William Brown, grew up playing in the woods around the area.
Now Edmond wants to trace the church’s origins to preserve its history for his kids and their kids, and on into the future.
Starting the search
Prairie Hill Missionary Baptist Church is a small brick building on Wicks Road, just off Gilmer-Wilburn Road in the western part of Lowndes County. It’s close to several other small African-American churches that have been in the area for years, including New Zion Church and New Prospect.
Edmond began looking for the church’s origins about two months ago, shortly after Prairie Hill’s new pastor suggested the church celebrate its anniversary. As far as Edmond and his family members knew, the church had never celebrated its anniversary before. In fact, it seemed to Edmond that no one quite knew how old the church was.
Edmond began talking to older church members and doing research online to see if he could nail down a date. The oldest members of the church remembered that it moved to its current location on Wicks Road sometime in the 1960s. Edmond and the administration eventually determined that the church dates back to at least 1911, said the pastor, Jimmy Cockrell.
Edmond decided to keep looking. He began by talking to the church’s oldest surviving members, including his uncle, William Brown, who was born in 1929. Many of them called Prairie Hill “Whitfield,” just like their parents and grandparents who were members of the church before them.
“They all were saying ‘Whitfield,'” Edmond said. “And that’s got me so messed up because I thought that the church was named Whitfield and it changed from Whitfield to Prairie Hill Missionary Baptist Church. And that’s what I went looking for.”
Brown explained that in the early 1900s, there were several churches in the western part of the county where the African-American sharecroppers who worked the land worshiped. They sometimes went from church to church, though Brown said they needed permission from the landowners to go to other plantations to attend church services and other events like baseball games. So, many of the churches stayed on the landowners’ property. At that time, the congregation members all referred to the churches by the name of the landowners who owned the property where the church was located such as Wicks, Cox and Whitfield.
For this reason, Edmond thinks the church may be far older than 115 years.
He did some research online and learned that James Whitfield, early Columbus resident and 18th governor of Mississippi, sold land in the western part of the county to the Billups family in 1852. Many of the churches in the area, including Prairie Hill, are now on land that was owned by the Billups family in the 1800s and early 1900s.
Edmond’s theory is that the congregation that is now Prairie Hill began on the Whitfield plantation — meaning that it could predate the Civil War. Now he just needs some sort of document that proves his hunch right.
Resources
Finding proof that the church is that old is proving harder than Edmond thought it would be at first. He continued searching online for any information about the plantations in western Lowndes County and whether any African-American churches were on them. Many websites had no information, and others he couldn’t get on.
At the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library, he found the church on a conservation map dated 1911. It had the church located in a slightly different location, between Billups Station and Tom Hardy Place, in a small patch of land now overrun with woods. The church didn’t move to its current location on Wicks Road until the 1960s.
He’s also been to the courthouse looking for land deeds and other documentation that might show the location of old rural churches on plantations. So far, he’s pieced together that the Hardy and Billups families owned land in that part of the county in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Now he plans to find out more about those families and see if that takes him anywhere. He wants older members of the church who know Billups family members better than he does to talk to them about seeing if they can provide documentation like letters and old Bibles that might shed light on Prairie Hill’s history.
“Trying to find information is hard,” Edmond said. “I don’t want to know anything about the person who owned the property — the Billups or the Hardys — I don’t want to pry in their business and all that kind of stuff. I’m just trying to find was there a church there beyond 1911. And if I had a document that says that.” … “There ought to be something there to say there was a church there.”
Keeping records
It can be difficult to track the history of any small rural church if the church doesn’t keep records or those records are lost, according to Chuck Yarborough, history instructor with the Mississippi School for Mathematics and Science.
“Generally, trying to uncover the history of any small rural congregation, black or white, is difficult if the church doesn’t have its own records,” Yarborough said. “Typically … they were leading institutions in the community, but they weren’t necessarily institutions that dealt with a lot of public issues that would be reported in the newspapers for example. Consequently, if the church doesn’t have its records — which may have been lost to fire, may have been lost to just moisture, mildew, age, or may have not really been produced because much of the congregation was of low literacy or of no literacy — it’s a difficult task sometimes.”
Local historian Rufus Ward, whom Edmond reached out to for help with his research, agreed and suggested that finding plantation records or documents held by the families of the landowners could sometimes reveal information about the lives of sharecroppers who lived on and worked the land. Similar records can be found in white churches, he added.
“You have to use multiple sources,” he said.
Because many older members cannot remember particulars such as the dates something happened or what their parents said about the church’s origins, what Edmond really wants to find is an old Bible owned by congregation members from the early 1900s or earlier. Yarborough thinks this is a good idea.
“It speaks to the value of documents, letters, photographs, diaries, Bibles, which might be in the possession of family members,” he said. “And family members sometimes don’t view them as historically significant. But every one of those documents is extraordinarily significant because of the lack of records in those small rural congregations.
“These are historically significant pieces,” Yarborough added. “And we need a lot out of those puzzle pieces to be able to put together the story of our rural communities in particular.”
Edmond still has research to do. He doesn’t plan on giving up any time soon. He wants to find what information he can and preserve it in the church or in the Columbus-Lowndes Public Library for future generations.
“I want my kids and their kids to know about the church,” he said.
Note: Anyone with information on the history of Prairie Hill Missionary Baptist Church can contact Samson Edmond at 662-549-8191 or [email protected].
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