Sherrod

The last days of Barnes Primitive Baptist Church, in color.

Last week’s highlight was the discovery of the rusted tin, charred beams, and old brick that mark the site of Barnes Primitive Baptist Church, a congregation formed by freed slaves shortly after Emancipation. Yesterday, I received digital copies of three precious Polaroid photographs of Barnes Church taken in 1977 when the church closed and moved south to Watery Branch Church Road in Wayne County.

In the first photo, Barnes Church’s long-time pastor, Elder Kemmy A. Sherrod, stands with Deacon Douglas Barnes between the church’s two entrances. Elder Sherrod, a Wayne County native, was a grandson of Jack and Cassie Exum Sherrod and also pastored Turner Swamp Primitive Baptist Church in Eureka, N.C., and New Center Primitive Baptist Church of Reidsville, N.C., and served as moderator of the Turner Swamp Primitive Baptist Association and Durham Primitive Baptist Association.

The second photo, taken over the long hood of a car, shows the church’s southern elevation. That’s the chimney whose broken base we found standing in the woods.

The third hones in on the church’s simple, porchless, front-gable form. Fire consumed Barnes Church after it was vacated, and we found no sign of its plank siding, doors, or windows.

My unending gratitude to Leonard P. Sherrod Jr. for sharing these priceless photographs with me and to his cousin Cheryl Sherrod Pope for granting me permission to post them here!

Barnes Primitive Baptist Church, found.

Three years ago, I asked, “Where was Barnes Church?” Today, I have an answer.

Founded just after slavery, Barnes Church was one of the earliest African-American churches in Wilson County. Its simple double-doored, gable-front building is believed to have been erected shortly after the church’s establishment.

Barnes Church circa 1960s.

My father’s classmate L. Paul Sherrod Jr. asked me to explore the little spit of woods that I knew had once been the site of the church, but in which I’d not found any traces of the nineteenth-century building. My earlier looks had been in summer, though, when I could barely get a glimpse inside the woodline.

We entered via an old driveway over the ditch and immediately spotted this stack. I was puzzled at first, as this is obviously newer brick. A walk-around, however, revealed old brick piers, the corners of a building came into view, and this broken stack may have been a later addition that vented a wood stove. Curled trips of tin roofing lay rusting underfoot.

And then I spotted this. Barnes Church burned down after it was vacated. Here was a charred length of sill beam — with a four-inch, square-cut nail.

The nail. It was not hand-wrought, but cut from a sheet, as indicating by only two sides tapering. The head would have been added by hand. The earliest machine-cut nails of this type date to about 1840.

A brick from one of the piers. It is unmarked, but probably made locally.

This sill beam, from the north side of the building, is charred but unbroken.

A section still resting on a pier.

The pollen, y’all.

Paul and Barbara Sherrod, my guides. We’ve met Mr. Sherrod here and here and here.

It’s heard to visualize, but I’m standing in front the church’s site, perhaps seven feet from its front wall.

Barnes Primitive Baptist Church did not own its building or the land on which it stood. When the landowner refused to allow the congregation to upgrade the building, members of the Sherrod family donated land for a new church a few miles south, just across the Wayne County line on Watery Branch Road. The “new” church is now occupied by Now Faith Missionary Baptist Church.

Local men fought for freedom.

Last week, Wilson County Genealogical Society presented a program on the 135th Regiment of the United States Colored Troops featuring local descendants of Jack Sherrod, whose farm lay just across the Wayne County line and whose family had close Wilson County ties.

Wilson Times, 5 March 2024.

Thank you, Leonard P. Sherrod Jr., for bringing this event to my attention.

Pfc. Elmer Sherrod earns diploma in Army.

Wilson Daily Times, 4 March 1949.

In the 1930 census of Wilson township, Wilson County: on Harpers Road, farmer Soloman Sheard, 50; wife Josephine, 42; and children Javis, 20, Doretta, 18, Linton O., 16, Minnie B., 13, Solomon, 11, Flora, 3, Bulah, 3, and Elmore, 1.

In the 1940 census of Wilson, Wilson County: at 802 Viola Street, Solomon Shearard, 60; wife Josephine, 52; and children Flora, 15, Beulah, 13, Elmer, 11, and Solomon, 21; plus “son’s wife” Mildred, 18, and grandson Ernest E., 8 months.

Elmer Sherrod registered for the draft in 1947:

Photograph courtesy of C. Paulin.

The shoe shine contest.

This photograph posted yesterday to the Instagram account @blackarchives.co, and my inbox blew up. Here’s the back story.

Back in September 2013, a couple of years before Black Wide-Awake launched, Will Robinson posted this to Wilson County Public Library’s local history and genealogy blog:

I jumped on it:

Suddenly:

… which led to an email exchange:

… which led to Will Robinson finding this 23 February 1952 Daily Times article about the event, which took place at Reid Street Community Center:

… which led to this September 2014 WUNC article that includes a dozen contest photos and short video featuring contest winner Curtis Phillips (and my cousin Otis Sherrod talking about his brother Earnest Sherrod, who’s the boy at far left.) 

Wilson County Public Library later exhibited the prints Linda Zimmerman donated, and she graciously extended me the opportunity to purchase a print of the photo @blackarchives.co posted yesterday. Almost exactly ten years after I first saw John Zimmerman’s work, I’m delighted to these priceless images find a wider audience. 

The Wilson diaspora.

As I was about to board the elevator in my office building, the shirt pocket of the gentleman next to me caught my eye. In large letters on his gold name tag: SHERROD.

“I grew up in a place where there are lots of Sherrods,” I said suddenly. “Eastern North Carolina.”

He turned into face me fully. “I’m from eastern North Carolina, too,” he responded. “Wilson.”

I screamed a little. “What?!?! Get out of here. I’m from Wilson, too!”

He asked my surname, and when I answered, he said, “… Reggie Henderson?”

“That’s my dad!”

“Coach Hen, we called him.”

“That’s my dad!”

He told me he had been sorry to hear of my father’s passing and asked after my mother, then mentioned our next-door neighbor Herbert Woodard, who also recently passed. We talked about a few people we knew in common, and I asked if he’d graduated from Darden, “Yes,” he said, “class of 1970.”

“The last class!,” I exclaimed, and he nodded.

He didn’t know if he is related to my Viola Street cousins, but I claim John Sherrod anyway. Black Wide-Awake!

Recommended reading, no. 9.
I know I have a romantic view of old East Wilson (old, as in before it was ravaged by disinvestment and the crack trade), attributable to my very safe and happy childhood there. Still, I am sometimes reminded how shallow my rosy recollection can be and how it may serve to erase or obscure less happy stories.

One of my cousins, 20 years older than I, published a memoir a few years ago. The early pages of Sherrod Village are set on streets I’ve walked and peopled by folks I knew in East Wilson. Barbara Williams Lewis’ grandmother Josephine Artis Sherrod was my great-great-grandmother’s sister; they were two of the “innumerable” children of Adam T. Artis. (Barbara’s mother, in fact, is who described them to me that way.) I thought I would recognize so much in Barbara’s book. And I did. But I didn’t.

Children are shielded from so much ugliness — if they’re lucky, as I was — and understand so little of what they see. The ragged past of sweet old people is not always apparent in their mild present. Nonetheless, though my own family’s story involved poverty and insecurity and pain, I have believed that my recollected truth was true. I have, perhaps, counted on it.

I’ve spoken often about viewing East Wilson as a palimpsest. However, for too long I processed little beneath the surface of my own Polaroid-tinted memories of crepe myrtles, corner stores, and swimming lessons at Reid Street Community Center. I knew the history of the place, but not the often bitter stories of its people. Fifteen pages into Sherrod Village, I wrote to Barbara that I was “staggered.” I finished the book in the same state of astonishment.

I thank Barbara for her honesty and bravery. I thank her also for pushing me toward deeper and more empathic consideration as I continue to build space for our community’s stories.

The death of Mildred Lassiter Sherrod.

Mildred Sherrod and son Earnest, circa 1942.

Wilson Daily Times, 5 February 1943.

——

Mildred Sherrod was only 20 years old at her death. She was buried in Rountree Cemetery.

[Note: her surname was spelled two different ways in this death notice — Sherard and Shearard — and the family now uses the spelling “Sherrod.”]

Photo courtesy of Angelia M. Sherrod.