Shannon Bothwell, a dedicated volunteer in ZSR Special Collection and Archives, offers this reflection on her work to transcribe an entire volume of records for a historically significant North Carolina church.

Transcribing the Minutes of Cashie Baptist Church, Volume 1 (1791-1832)

Bringing hidden treasures into the light is a signature activity of archivists everywhere, and digitization opens a new world of possibilities. Historic manuscripts can be difficult to read and hard to review quickly, while fragile documents can’t be handled too often. Fortunately ZSR Special Collections and Archives is systematically working to make materials available to researchers and the public in a format that’s accessible from anywhere in the world and susceptible to search.

An ongoing project at SCA is the digitization of the extensive collection of original materials relating to Baptist churches in North Carolina. The second important piece of the puzzle is the transcription of these manuscripts, using the crowdsourced platform From the Page. Volunteers can use the simple, intuitive platform to help transcribe various digitized materials, and the result is a searchable, indexed file that allows researchers to quickly find relevant content.

As part of this project, in the fall 2024 semester I transcribed Cashie Baptist Church Minutes, Volume 1, spanning the years 1791 to 1832.

Cashie Baptist Church was established in 1771 in Eastern North Carolina’s Bertie County, and three members of this church were founding trustees of what was then called the Wake Forest Institute.

What’s in Those Manuscripts?

Each Baptist church is an independently-constituted, self-governing entity, and the church records resemble minutes of a business organization. Typical events memorialized in the minutes might include the hiring or ordination of pastors and deacons, financial reports from the treasurer, and decisions about repairing or replacing the meeting house.

The most common topic in the minutes of church conferences is changes in membership. New members were accepted into the church either by (1) providing a letter from a church with similar beliefs declaring the person to be in good standing or (2) relating their personal religious experiences and subsequently undergoing baptism by complete immersion. Members were excluded from the church by votes taken in conference after examination of their “disorderly” conduct, which might be excessive drinking, gambling, absenteeism, or other faults.

Some Highlights

While the discussion of bad behavior by members is certainly entertaining, several passages stood out as meaningful with the benefit of several hundred years of hindsight and context.

In the spring of 1826, the congregation had decided to construct a new meeting house and was considering three different options for the location. In March the church determined that the final vote would be taken at the April conference, but when it came time to vote the members first debated the logistics of the vote. Specifically, would the female members of the congregation be allowed to vote?

“By Motion resolved that the resolution of our last meeting relative to the location of the new Meeting house being decided by the Vote of the Brethren + Sisters be struck out + that the Question be taken whether or not Sisters were privileged to vote when it was determined after considerable debate in the affirmative by a large Majority”

It’s easy to imagine what “considerable debate” could occur in a congregation in which all the ordained leaders were men while a majority of the members were women.

Later that year, the church faced the question of whether the church should grant a license to preach to an enslaved person. The congregation included a number of enslaved people, and the short notation in the August 1826 minutes manages to communicate a great deal about how the church viewed these members.

“Having gone through so much disagreeable business, We were relieved by our enslaved brother Miles (the slave of J Watson) coming forward to tell us concerning his call to preach Christs Gospel, we take pleasure in recording he gave full satisfaction to the church of his call + hoping + believing the Lord chooses the Weak sometimes to confound the strong we grant him full liberty [to] preach where he may be called + ordered that the clerk give him written testimony of this privilege”

This is the text in the image above, for those wondering what early 19th century records look like.

Another notable component of the minutes is several biographical sketches of significant church leaders recorded on the occasion of their passing. The first example was a summary of the life of Ann Durgan, the wife of the founding pastor of the church, who died in 1808. When the church’s long-time pastor Aaron Spivey died in 1823, the church marked its respect for him by transcribing into the minutes a lengthy (18 page) and vivid personal memoir describing his faith journey.

While the several church clerks who created these records were primarily concerned with keeping business records, they unwittingly offer us an eyewitness account of the activities of an entire community. The brief references to events in the members’ lives and the challenges faced by the church paint a striking portrait of life in eastern North Carolina in the early republic.

Join Us

ZSR adds fresh digitized documents to From the Page regularly, and new volunteers are welcome to get involved with the project. Together, we can make these fragile and precious materials discoverable for future researchers to help us all gain a greater understanding of our shared history.