The beautiful and healthful city of Talladega is located among the
Appalachian foot hills. The First Congregational church was organized in
the year 1868. The first members were people who came out of the colored
Baptist Church, and who had begun to look for a more intelligent mode of
worship and better religious instruction than it was possible to have in
churches whose pastors had been slaves and were uneducated.
The first pastor of the church was Rev. H. E. Brown, of Ridgefield, O.,
whom the American Missionary Association had sent into the South. Since
his retirement the pulpit has been occupied by several pastors, including
the acceptable services of professors of Talladega College. My pastorate
began in 1894.
There are friendly relations between our church and the other colored
churches near at hand. The pastor is often invited to preach in the other
churches. The pastors of two of the Baptist churches are graduates of our
school here, and the pastor of one of the Methodist churches is now taking
lessons in our seminary.
The present membership of the church is 219. Many of them are poor
students who have to be helped through school. The resident members have
but very little money. With one or two exceptions they receive small pay
for what they do. Those who have trades find but little here to do and
have to go away to get employment. Among the male members of the church
are farmers, mechanics, etc., and among the females those who do laundry
work, sewing, etc. Several of these women take the washing of families
home and work very hard for a very little money with which to subsist
their families, buy books, and pay tuition for their children in Talladega
College.
There are about thirty-five members of the church who own their homes, and
about eleven who rent the places where they live. Several of the homes
owned by the members of the church are fairly comfortable for Southern
homes, having from two to seven rooms. None of them are costly. I do not
suppose that one of them cost $1,000. Neither is the furniture in them
costly. Scarcely any of them have carpets on their floors. They look upon
carpets as a luxury which they cannot afford. Plaster on the walls is
almost as rare as carpets on the floors. In some cases there is not a
rocking-chair in the house. The furniture they have is of a very ordinary
kind.
The people have but very little money and are obliged to struggle long and
hard to get a little place to call home, in many cases buying the lumber
and hiring the carpenter on credit. This being the case, it takes them
years and years to pay for the little homes. The homes vary from the
fairly comfortable to the wretched. It is noticeable that those who have
had the advantages of an education have better homes than those who have
no education.
There comes to mind as I write one very miserable home in which both the
parents are ignorant. There are three rooms to the house not nearly so
comfortable as the places where Northern farmers keep their horses and
cattle. There is neither stove nor grate in the house, but simply some
rocks on each side of the open fireplace on which they lay the green wood,
by which they sit and shiver while the cold winds blow through the cracks
in the floor and sides of the house. There are six children and only two
excuses for beds. One of these has on it a tick, the other has a pile of
dirty rags. There is not a whole table or chair in the house.
And yet, these people, like many others just as poor as they, are trying
to educate their children. They believe that in Christian education lies
the only redemption from this condition for them and their race, through
their children, who are enjoying privileges that were denied to them.
There are not more than a dozen individuals in the church who are earning
a comfortable living. More than that number did so when times were better,
but now there is not much for them to do except conduct very poor farms,
on which they cannot earn enough to make themselves comfortable.
There have been very few years in the history of the church when it did
not have a revival of religion. Of late it has been the custom to have two
series of special services each year--one during the winter, while the
school is in session, and another during the summer vacation. Effort is
made each year to have all the students converted. Of all the young people
who have graduated here only two have left without being professing
Christians.
The growth of the church has not been rapid, but steady. During the days
of slavery the colored people were members of the churches to which their
masters belonged. None of them belonged to Congregational churches, and
so, when Congregationalism came to the South after the war, it was
entirely new to the former slaves and to those who had been their masters.
The masses of the children and the young people still cling to the
churches which their parents were taught to love. It will, therefore, be
some time before Congregationalism will grow rapidly in the South. The
church has no building of its own, and no parsonage, but worships in the
chapel of Talladega College. The building in which the chapel is located
was erected by the white Baptists of the Coosa Valley Association before
the war as a college for their sons. Some of the old slaves who helped to
put up the building lived to see freedom, to see the building come into
the hands of the American Missionary Association, and to see their own
children study and graduate in it.