A Church Built By Slaves....
Last Sunday I went over to St Paul's Episcopal Church to hear a talk by Dick Underwood on the history of the church. It was built in 1848 when the hamlet of Wilkesboro consisted of one dirt road and a few, very few, houses. It was built with the help of slave labor. Much of the free white congregation consisted of the larger land owners in the county. As Mr Underwood put it, of the tiny minority of 51 people in Wilkes who did not vote against secession in 1861, most of them probably went to Saint Paul's. There is a living link with this period here in Wilkesboro. One of the ladies in the audience mentioned that she has a black friend who has told her that her grandmother used to tell her stories of how she went to St Paul's when the slaves attended church with their masters, and therefore were Episcopalian, but had to sit in the back in the slave gallery. Blacks continued to be part of the Episcopal congregation for some time, but at some point broke with the church and went elsewhere.