Lower Black Creek Primitive Baptist Church, founded in 1783, was the second church organized in what is now Wilson County. (It closed its doors in 2010.) The church’s nineteenth and early twentieth-century records includes names of enslaved and freed African-American members, who worshipped with the congregation as second-class Christians even after Emancipation.

This page continues the previous “Reception to Babtism” entries from 1824 to 1831 (with other notes inserted in the second column.) It includes references to six enslaved African-Americans. (Don’t let “servant” fool you.) As Primitive Baptists did not practice infant baptism, the six were, if not adults, then nearly so, and thus were all born in the 1700s or very early 1800s. Some may have lived to see Emancipation, but even if they remained in Wilson County, I have no way to identify them further.

• Briton(?), a servant of Patience Aycock
• Cloah, a servant of John Barnes Senr
• Joe, a servant of William Horn
• Lidge, a servant of Hardy Horn
• Haywood, a servant of John Sherrod
• Haner, a servant of Little John Barnes

Copy of documents courtesy of J. Robert Boykin III. Originals now housed at North Carolina State Archives.