Salisbury residents will be among those traveling to a church in South Carolina this weekend where their ancestors, who were slaves, were allowed to be members along with their white slave masters.
Mary Hardin, Gwendolyn Plummer, Sarah Stowe, Norris Currence, and Mary Charles Adams are the local residents who will take part in the Armstrong-Currence Family Reunion beginning Friday at Bethel Presbyterian Church in York County, S.C.
The reunion will include descendants of slaves and slave masters who will gather to celebrate the lives of slaves who were members of the 247-year old church, a press release said.
The event will be the first of its kind in the county and in many other parts of the south. A highlight will be the unveiling of a bronze plaque near the church cemetery’s entrance. The plaque will serve as a permanent memorial for slaves who were baptized and inducted as members of Bethel, yet were not permitted after death to be buried in its rock-wall enclosed cemetery.
Although it was common for slaves to worship from the balconies of their owners’ churches, it was not often that they held membership, according to the press release. Bethel’s written rolls, which date back to the 1830s, reveal the baptisms and memberships of several “coloureds.” Prior to the Emancipation Proclamation, they were listed primarily by their first names; after slavery was abolished, those who remained at the church were listed by their full names.
Among those in the 1866 “coloured members” listing are Josiah Currence and his wife ,Matilda, born in Virginia around 1811 and 1812. Several freed Bethel slaves, including teenager Alexander Currence, left the church and organized Green Pond Methodist Episcopal Church in 1870; however, Josiah Currence remained at Bethel until his death in 1877. Likewise, it appears that Josiah’s son-in-law Abner (Adams) Armstrong remained at Bethel until his death (from measles) in 1870.
It is not known whether Josiah (whose wife, Matilda, was still alive in 1880) or any of the others who remained are buried on the church grounds, the press release said. Church historian Cary Grant says Bethel once hired a pilot to conduct a fly-over above the grounds to detect the presence of any slave grave markers. The pilot reportedly spotted some items with indentations beneath the ground, but died before he could return and do a more intensive search. Another attempt to locate graves is planned, according to Bethel Cemetery Society President Dean McCrary.
For many reunion attendees, this will be a first visit to the Bethel community — an area that is now a part of Clover and Lake Wylie in the upper Piedmont of South Carolina. However, some of the seniors will be returning to a land where they were born. Local residents Stowe, Adams, and family historian Plummer were born and raised on a portion of a tract of land sold to their grandfather Alex Currence for $1,000 in 1903 by the daughter of slave owner Robert. F. Currence.
To date, it is not known who owned the Currence slaves. The Armstrongs were owned by South Carolina native Jesse Kingsborough Armstrong and his wife Jane, who migrated from Ireland with her parents and siblings in the early 1800s. After slavery ended, two children of Abner and Mary Armstrong married two children of Henry and Viney Currence. A third Armstrong child married a child born to Viney and her second husband, William Adams. Many of the children of these marital bonds are buried in Green Pond Church Cemetery, the first burial ground for blacks in the Clover-Bethel area.
The Armstrong-Currence Family Reunion began in the 1950s.
Bethel Presbyterian Church was organized in 1764 by the Scotch and the Irish.