Local Pace resident, Martha L. Dickson spoke Saturday at the Pacifica Senior Living in the Carpenter's Creek meeting room for the Pensacola Historical Preservation Society regarding her book, Anchors of Faith: Early Wooden Churches of the Deep South, published September 2014 by New South Books of Montgomery, Alabama.
Dean DeBolt, University of West Florida archivist, said he invited her to speak. “I’ve known Martha a number of years. I stopped at her publisher’s in Montgomery and picked up several copies of her book. It’s an extraordinary book.”
Dickson’s book is the result of her passion for collecting the histories of old churches in the deep south. She said she travelled for two years all over Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and most of Florida taking pictures of 450 churches constructed between the early 1800s and early 1900s, as well as capturing their histories through signs, church members, and religious associations. Due to the amount of material she collected, only 145 of the churches made it into the book.
“My dad was quite a historian. I wrote a history of the little community I grew up in, in South Alabama, which was an early riverboat town. The county, Houston County, thought that that was good because it added to the history of the area and they awarded me a plaque on that and that encouraged me and then I wrote a devotional book. I didn’t get into (writing) until late in life. I’m 79. I guess I wrote the first book about 20 years ago.” The name of Dickson’s first was Gordon, Alabama: Pioneer Riverboat Town. “If I don’t write this down, the history will just disappear…Even though sometimes it might not get recognized, in general, there will be a place to put it so that it can be recorded; it can be kept,” she said.
Dickson said she shared her work with Martin Olliff, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Wiregrass Archives at the Dothan Campus of Troy University. “He asked me what I wanted to do with all the material I’d done, the pictures and everything … and I said, ‘Well, I’d love to get it published,’ and he made the contact to NewSouth books in Montgomery for me.”
Dickson said she started on Anchors by collecting articles on early churches. Travelling regularly to Houston with her husband, Max, she said she suggested a more scenic route during a trip and saw two wooden churches on a hill. One of them, she said, included the name of a woman, Barbara Locklin Memorial Baptist Church, and it had a historic sign out front with the date saying it was organized in the 1800s. It stuck out to her since it was rare, she said, for a Baptist Church to be named after a woman. “I stopped and got an address on a mailbox right across from the church. When we got back, I wrote a letter asking them if they could give me information to that address not knowing who it was…About six months later, I got a very nice letter and typed out history of that church and the little church which was right down from it, which was the beginning church in that community.” The pastor, she said, gave her the full history inspiring her to record the history of early wooden churches.
Dickson’s research split between cyberspace and the real world. “I had to look at a whole lot of Baptist and Methodist and all resources and their photographs…For the history, there are a lot of books in the library. I had to do a brief history of how the churches came to be built and why and what affected them and what architecture was chosen and why.”
Working out in the field required some investigative work. “It was hard to find people to talk to because all these wooden churches don’t have…an office or staff. They have a monthly or weekly minister and he may have one church, or two churches, or three churches. Every now and then I would find somebody at the church and they would be either doing the grounds or doing something like that and they would say, ‘Would you like to see inside the church?’ But I would say more than half the churches I didn’t get to go in because they were closed during the week. They just do not have the staff and the other thing is you can’t really mail…much to the church itself because…nobody’s at the church to get the mail.” Some of the churches were not only closed but inactive, making the quest for history even more difficult.
While communities left some churches to the elements, Dickson said others received active support. “The majority of them people were trying to keep them up. One lovely church I visited, the lady right across the street…she was one of the five members who still attended that lovely church and were trying to keep it up. It was beautiful, early 1800s built…Several of the churches did have detailed histories…Somebody in the congregation, even though it was diminished had kept the history of it.” Dickson said Baptist associations are good about keeping history on its churches. She said she also collected oral histories from neighbors to the churches she found.
“There’s a church in Belleville (Alabama). The community has just disappeared but they have kept their church, one of the earliest churches in Alabama. It was established by a circuit-riding minister. Circuit riding was the founding factor for the spread of Methodism, which was the primary church in the period of these early churches. I was astounded. I thought everybody in Alabama was Baptist because mostly they are now, but these early churches, the majority of them was Methodist.”
Discover more interesting stories and histories from churches of the early 1800s to 1900s in Dickson’s Anchors of Faith: Early Wooden Churches of the Deep South. Her work is available in paperback from Amazon at $27.95 and on Kindle at $9.99. DeBolt also said he has copies at the archives available for perusal there.
This article originally appeared on Santa Rosa Press Gazette: Author divines early southern church histories