The Bizarre Sharp Mountain Revival of 1873

Sharp Mountain Baptist, Ball Ground

Historian Bernice McCullar provided, through her popular Atlanta newspaper column,

Georgia Notebook many Georgians of her day with all of the history of their state that they

ever received. In her piece of November 28, 1966, in The Atlanta Journal, she told a tale that

still haunts many people: Tombstones Tell the Tale of Great Revival of 1873 about an event in Cherokee County, Georgia, south of Chattanooga.

McCullar wrote of how she and a friend were looking for a tombstone in northern Cherokee

County when they came upon some odd grave markers. When added to information from records and local memories, according to McCullar, the tombstones tell a bizarre story. The Reverend Francis Marion Williams held the annual revival at Sharp Mountain Church in late September 1873 and "was about to line out the hymn when a bright light suddenly appeared in the log church that emitted what sounded to different people present as rushing water, angel voices, and music. Supposedly, the members of the congregation were in such awe of the light that they then refused to leave the log church except when necessary. People literally came from miles around and from other counties to witness this miracle. The light continued for weeks and finally, when the baptisms began, Williams had to have the aid of colleague Reverends Benjamin Hitt and Elias Walter Allred to cut a hole in the frozen Etowah River to baptize the record seventy-three converts.

Such an incredible tale must have survived in public memory but McCullar alone put it in

print. Many people failed in searching the local cemeteries for the tombstones described. Local genealogist John Carver did discover on James Hendrix's grave marker in Sharp Mountain Baptist Church cemetery that it states that Hendrix joined the church in November 1873 as one of seventy-seven converts baptized the following December. A search of local histories and the contemporary newspapers in Atlanta failed to find any mention of these events.

The Sharp Mountain Baptist Church minutes of the period, published verbatim in The

Heritage of Cherokee County, Georgia 1831-1998 does not answer the questions of the

mysterious light. Revival actually began at the church on November 2, 1873, and ended ten

days later. The church then received sixty-two persons as members by experience. The

December 6 meeting received fifteen other members by experience and four more so joined on December 26. The Atlanta Constitution reported that the December 6 meeting had sixty-six people baptized in sixteen minutes. Peggy Blackwell of the Sequoyah Regional Library found a file on the Reverend Francis Marion Williams who presided over this revival, as provided by a library patron. It proved interesting for what it did not say. The file contained extensive biographical material on Williams, including his granddaughter's detailed memories of what he told her about his long career as a Baptist minister. Not one word appeared there or in his obituary about the revival of 1873 however.

Did the events McCullough described happen? Dr. Robert G. Gardner of the Georgia

Baptist Historical Collection at Mercer University deepened the mystery. He found an article

from the Christian Index of January 8, 1874 that announced that Reverend F. M. Williams had

held a revival at Sharp Mountain Baptist Church for eleven days in November that brought in

more than eighty converts by experience and baptism. On the first Sunday in December, the

reverends Allred and Hitt administered baptisms to seventy-nine persons in fifteen minutes

despite unfavorable weather. A.K., the author, wrote of these events as the most remarkable

revival ever held in Cherokee Georgia" and proof that "the glorious work of the Spirit was indeed overwhelming.

Gardner found that the Hightower Baptist Association minutes proved equally interesting.

From 1870 through 1872, the membership of Sharp Mountain Baptist Church grew only from

fifty-three to fifty-eight members, with few if any baptisms. The minutes for 1873 do not survive

but, in the minutes for 1874, the first association meeting after the events of November-

December 1873, the church had a membership of 165 counting 105 baptisms! The following

year, the church remained at a membership of 165 and had only two baptisms. The minutes

contain no explanation for these statistics.

A major awakening had happened in this small log country church but whatever happened, no one chose to comment on the details except perhaps in some now unknown way to

Bernice McCullar ninety years later. The light and sound have a probable, less than miraculous, explanation. Wet rotting logs, such as what probably made up the church building, sometimes develop foxfire, a slow combustion that creates a phosphorescent glow and a sound but does not give off heat. Fireflies glow for this same reason. In addition, geologists have discovered that geological faults sometimes cause electromagnetic discharges of balls of fire and plasma, believed to cause the unidentified flying object sightings that frequently occur along such the faults. Equally significant, they theorize that these same magnetic fields cause exceptionally vivid hallucinations that leave the victims particularly susceptible to suggestions (such as by a church sermon that becomes hypnotic), by events, or by dreams. Alien abduction tales likely have an origin in such conditions.

Foxfire - bioluminescence

The strict and partially superstitious nature of the church/s traditional decorum encouraged the congregation to believe in what seemed at first as a miracle, their own bush that burned without being consumed. Founded on August 12, 1836, it originally had slaves among its members and Cherokee Indians for neighbors. Floyd C. Watkins devoted a whole chapter to Sharp Mountain Church in his Yesterday in the Hills without mentioning the revival of 1873. He wrote, however, that the church followed such strict doctrine that it had separate front entrances and seating for men and women. The congregation held revival when the spirit moved them. Its members forbade the playing of musical instruments and paying the preacher as sins against God.

Recent events had also contributed to the emotional instability of members of the

community and the congregation. In 1873, Georgia and the nation suffered in the Civil War-

Reconstruction era. Ministers worked during those years to heal the often violent divisions in the north Georgia communities brought about by the politics of the war. During the all too recent Civil War, state representative Reverend Elias W. Allred of Pickens County, but a minister at Sharp Mountain, suffered arrest by Confederate authorities in 1864 but

earned release because of personal connections to Governor Joseph E. Brown. He had organized a company of his neighbors to protect people who wanted nothing to do with the war. Captain Benjamin F. Jordan, the son of a Pickens County Baptist minister captured and allegedly hung by the Union army, had Reverend John Richards of Cherokee County executed in 1864, reportedly for preaching against secession. Confederate Colonel George W. Lee of Atlanta arrested Baptist preacher William Tate of Lumpkin County in 1863.

The late John Seawright discovered that an equally divisive controversy followed. Historian John Seawright discovered that in 1866 Henry Josiah Scrugg arrived in Cherokee County from East Tennessee and, with his powerful preaching, won numerous converts to membership and baptism. He led revivals at various churches and the Sardis Church elected him as minister annually from 1866 to 1868. Scruggs might have received notice in Baptist history had he not moved so much in his ministry. Born in the Cherokee Indian territory that became Union County, Georgia in February 1825, Scruggs had to leave Alabama for fondling a girl on the mourner's bench. Cookston Creek Baptist Church in Parksville, Polk County, Tennessee excluded him from fellowship in May 1861 for having abandoned his wife and children in Alabama before moving to Tennessee with another woman he called his wife. He moved on to Arkansas by 1870 and served various congregations there, amid more controversy, until his death in Baird, Texas on June 19, 1900.

Sharp Mountain and five other churches refused to admit to fellowship Scruggs' followers until the converts received new baptism by other licensed Baptist preachers. In 1868, the Hightower Association ruled in favor of unconditionally accepting Scruggs' followers, however. It then deemed Sharp Mountain as a rebel slab-off outfit (a sawmill term for bad wood) for refusing them as members.

According to Watkins, the pro-Scruggs faction at Sharp Mountain responded by locking

the church with a chain and padlock. Grandmother Mary Brown Watkins, sister of Governor

Joseph E. Brown, used an axe to break the chain while singing Work for Jesus. Unable to mend the divisions at Sharp Mountain, she transferred to a church in Ball Ground. The

Scruggite/Slab-offs controversy raged on for twenty years, creating two new associations,

divisions among churches, and even acts of violence.

These events began before the strange revival of 1873 but whatever happened that

November likely pushed an already tense situation to a new level. Outside of Christian miracles, people in rural Appalachian Georgia also believed in magic, ghosts, and otherwise in the supernatural. After the revival and the baptisms, witnesses likely came to realize that they had seen a natural occurrence rather than a miracle. They chose to promote and remember the results rather than the cause. The event brought at least brief unity to a badly divided congregation when it needed a miracle most.

Did the revival include an unearthly light? That very much depends, then and since, on

what one chooses to believe and to tell. . .

NOTES:

1 Cherokee County Heritage Book Committee, The Heritage of Cherokee County Georgia 1831-1998 (Canton: The Author, 1998), 44; Atlanta Constitution, December 13, 1873, p. 1 c. 3.

2 Cherokee Advance (Canton, Georgia), August 14, 1914, p. 7, c. 5-6.

3 Christian Index (Macon, Georgia), January 8, 1874, p. 2, c. 2.

4 Floyd S. and Charles H. Watkins, Yesterday in the Hills (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1963), 31, 39.

5 Faye Stone Poss, comp., The Southern Watchman, Athens, Georgia Civil War Home Front Coverage 1861-1865 (Snellville, GA, 2008), 344; “Mr. Aldred of Pickens County,” Daily Intelligencer (Atlanta), March 2, 1865, p. 2 c. 2; Heritage of Cherokee County, Georgia, Book Committee, The Heritage of Cherokee County Georgia 1831-1998 (Waynesville, NC, 1998), 481-82; Andrew W. Cain, History of Lumpkin County for the First Hundred Years 1832-1932 (Atlanta, 1932), 348-49; John W. Latty, A Fine Body of Athletic Soldiers: a History of

the 11th Georgia Cavalry Regiment (Gainesville, GA, 2007), 34. For more on Georgia Baptists and the politics of the Civil War see Bruce T. Gourley, Diverging Loyalties: Baptists in Middle Georgia during the Civil War (Macon, Ga., 2011).

6 Hightower Baptist Association History Committee, "The Men and Missions of Hightower," (2 vols., 2005), 1: 377-78, 2: 478, volume one is at the Seqouyah Regional Library in Canton, Georgia, and volume two is in the Dawson County Public Library in Dawsonville, Georgia; Henry J. Scruggs, Cherokee County, Returns of Qualified Voters (1867),vols. 128: 22, vol. 238: 363, microfilm reels 296/75 and 297/27, Georgia Archives,

Morrow; Gilmer County, p.443A, Seventh Census of the United States (1850) (National Archives microfilm M432, roll 70), Polk County, p. 404, Eighth Census of the United States (1860) (National Archives microfilm M653, roll 1208), Yell County, p. 541, Ninth Census of the United States (1870) (National Archives microfilm M593, roll 6), Perry County, District 121, p. 178D, Tenth Census of the United States (1880) (National Archives microfilm T9, roll 53), Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives and Records

Administration; Find a Grave, Henry J. Scruggs, online site https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/89452500.

7 Hightower Baptist Association History Committee, "The Men and Missions of Hightower," 1:377-78.

8 Watkins and Watkins, Yesterday in the Hills, 33-34; Atlanta Constitution, December 26, 1886, p. 1 c. 5, February 4, 1887, p. 2, c. 4.