Benton County, Tennessee Baptists

The following excerpts come from Tennessee County History Series: Benton County by Jonathan Kennon T. Smith (Memphis, TN: Memphis State University Press, 1979). These are items I found while searching online for information on Isaac Reed, and thought them interesting enough to save and post.

From pages 23-24

Josiah Turner Florence (1809-1881) and his wife, Avis, moved to the Rushing settlement in Pleasant Valley in 1836. A native of Caswell County, North Carolina, Florence had a better-than-average formal education that enabled him to teach for more than 30 years at a school near his residence. Elisha Herrin from Franklin County, Tennessee, settled in the Rushing’s Creek area about 1823; his brother, Elder Lemuel Herrin, accompanied him. Elder Herrin was pastor of Rushing’s Creek Baptist Church for several years; later he moved to eastern Texas, where he helped establish several churches. Abimeleck and Beverly Herrin settled near these Herrins.

Their neighbor was one of the county’s outstanding citizens, Jacob Browning, D. D. (1779-1841). A native of North Carolina, Elder Browning emigrated to Middle Tennessee as a young man and lived for many years in Rutherford County. He was reared a Presbyterian, but later became a Baptist...Elder Browning was instrumental in organizing the first association of his denomination, the Western District Baptist Association, in July of 1823, at Spring Creek in Henry County. From the mid-1830s, he became a leading advocate of the pro-missionary faction of the Baptist Church. He was responsible for founding several of the area’s earliest Baptist congregations, among them the historic Hollow Rock Primitive Baptist Church in July of 1823. After 1824 he and his family lived on a small farm off Ebenezer Branch of Rushing’s Creek. There he built a comfortable log house where Pleasant Valley lay in a soft roll. His remains and those of some of his family lie buried in a nearby family graveyard.

From page 75:

On May 7, 1825, under the guidance of Elders Jacob Browning and John Horn, the people of the Rushing’s Creek area organized a congregation. They built a log meeting house on Abel Rushing’s farm. Its present brick house was erected in 1952-1953 on the site of its predecessors. The county’s first settlement centennial celebration, scheduled for 1918, was postponed due to the war then raging. The Benton County Homecoming was held on May 7, 1925, at Rushing’s Creek Baptist Church in conjunction with this congregation’s centenary. It was a grand success; a day remembered in local history.

In the summer of 1823, several of the Baptist leaders in the Western District met together to organize an association for their congregations. In September of 1823, the first West Tennessee Baptist association was organized as the Western District Association at Bird’s Creek Meetinghouse in Henry County. They held to the strict Calvinism of the Regular Baptists, as they were called.

In September of 1828, the Western District Association met in the Clark’s River meeting house with delegates from 30 congregations present. On September 15th, these delegates divided amicably over the issue of “atonement.” The more Calvinistic congregations organized the Obion Association, while the Western District Association “went missionary,” according to its early historian Lewis Edgar.