Cade’s Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is a truly special place.

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9/06/23 54m  · Travels in Baptist History- records! Post by Jim Curran

To me Cade’s Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park is a truly special place. To those around the world unaware, this is a preserved area of a pioneer settlement with several houses and cabins along with three preserved church buildings- a Primitive Baptist Church, a Missionary Baptist Church and a Methodist church all dating back to the early 1800’s. To me it is a very special place where you can soak in the history. We were once “caught” for about 30 minutes in the midst of a rain downpour in the Missionary Baptist Church- what a peaceful time to just sit there and imagine the past. On that trip a while back I first really noticed there was far more interest in the Primitive than the Missionary Baptist church both by the hoards of tourists and the National Park Service.In the past I had always assumed that this was due to the fact that the Primitive building as well as the cemetery were older. Of course they had once been one church but split in 1838 over missions and hypercalvinism. This vacation however I was able to catch one of the programs given by a volunteer that was actually a decedent of some of the folks that had been in the church many years ago. There were many stories that he recounted about the people and about the history of the church and building. At the close I asked him if there were ever any programs over at the Missionary Baptist Church. His answer was very enlightening- there were not any programs over there (or at the Methodist one for that manner) as there were not really records. While the Primitives retained the earlier records and kept good ones the Missionary Baptist ones had been lost at some point. “What if” really rears its head here for how much could have been told, rather than the often very contentious Calvinism of the Primitives how about the evangelism of the early missions movement? There were stories there that have been lost.This brings up an interesting thought- how much history has been lost? When a church closes many times those records disappear- sometimes those could hold clues to history. Not too far from where I live in Danville, VA the great evangelist Samuel Harriss is buried. Very close to where his estate and final resting place were there is an old old church building. At one point this used to be Strawberry (Baptist) Church. This church went primitive very early in the controversy and it’s records were unknown and it closed many many years ago. One local historian years back did manage to tie Harriss to it as the founder and I believe this was also the behind the name of the Strawberry Association that was formed very early here in Virginia. However the disassociation of the church and loss of records seems to have rendered some of this research very difficult.This also brings up another point. Many individual “church histories” devolve into dead statistics and bank balances. We need the stories of the people for whom Christ died. There are interesting stories of life in every church. I heard some of those stories in the Primitive Baptist church building that day. Many were fascinating including tales of daily life and the Civil War. Later as we went around the loop we came again to the Missionary Baptist building and walked inside. We had it to ourselves for perhaps 15 minutes but this time as we sat there and later as we walked through the cemetery I wondered about the stories that were lost. How many triumphs and tragedies were lost to time. Let’s always remember our history.Cade’s Cove to be continued…………….

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