In its second year, the Willow Hill Heritage Festival added a peek into the history of black Primitive Baptist churches to exhibits about the Willow Hill School and community.
    The festival Saturday served as a fundraiser for restoration of the Willow Hill School building and its development as a community center. One former classroom had been set up like a century-old Primitive Baptist sanctuary, complete with equipment for foot washing and communion.
    The former slaves who founded the first Willow Hill School in 1874 were Primitive Baptists. So the school’s early history was closely tied to that of Primitive Baptist Churches in the area. These included predominantly white churches, originally attended by enslaved blacks, from which the black Primitive Baptist churches sprang after emancipation, explained Dr. Alvin Jackson, president of the Willow Hill Heritage and Renaissance Center.
    About 200 people attended the festival’s late-morning prayer breakfast. There Jackson introduced as speaker Elder Thomas W. Samuels, D.D., president of the National Primitive Baptist Convention from 1995 to 2005 and still its historian. Samuels, now 78, pastored churches in Florida and North Carolina before retiring in 2006 at Mount Moriah Primitive Baptist Church in Charlotte, N.C., where he and his wife Juanita still reside.
    Samuels, Jackson observed, has made a written history of African American Primitive Baptists his legacy.
    “Why is that important?” Jackson asked, answering, “Because primarily, sometimes, we’ve been an oral people, and when our great elders die, it’s like a library burned to the ground.”
    Samuels’ remarks revolved around a Bible verse, 1 Kings 21:3, “The Lord forbid it to me, that I should give the inheritance of my fathers unto thee.” The church historian praised the Willow Hill organizers for their efforts.
    “I’m just really glad to come here today and see black people who are preserving their history,” Samuels said.
    He expressed thanks for “the old-time religion” and noted that many of the first schools for African-Americans were direct outgrowths of churches, with the same buildings serving as schools during the week and churches on Sunday.
    White settlers founded Nevils Creek Primitive Baptist Church, the oldest Primitive Baptist church in Georgia and the oldest church of any kind in Bulloch County, in 1790, six years before the county was named. But by the 1820s, this “white” church was attended by enslaved black people as well, and it was from it that the county’soldest black Primitive Baptist church, Banks CreekPrimitive Baptist, sprang in 1879, Jackson said.

Together, but apart
    This pattern was repeated in the founding of other black Primitive Baptist churches, according to Samuels.
    “In the old days, my grandfather told me, that we could sit in the balcony of the white churches and after the preacher preached his sermon to the white congregants, he would then preach a sermon to the black congregation, but we could not commune and fellowship,” he said in an interview. “We had to stay up in the balcony.”
    So these churches were biracial, but segregated within themselves, until after the Civil War ended and the South slowly outgrew the vestiges of slavery.
    “After slavery, the black Primitive Baptists wanted to organize their own churches, and the white people wanted to get them out of their churches because they shouted and made noise and disturbed the service,” Samuels said. “So they authorized elders like Aaron Munlin. They ordained them and qualified them to be pastors and they gave them permission to start their churches.”
    Elder Aaron Munlin, one of several church founders whose portraits are exhibited at Willow Hill, was ordained at Nevils Creek to serve as the first pastor at Banks Creek. A number of his descendants — including Banks Creek’s current pastor, Elder Joseph Mosley, and his cousin, Bulloch County Commissioner Ray Mosley — attended the festival.
    Bulloch’s first black Primitive Churches, including Banks Creek; Old Bethel, founded in 1882; and a church at Fish Trap Bridge, circa 1883, joined churches in Tattnall County in founding the Mount Pleasant Association in October 1887. Some of these churches were in Candler County when it was founded in 1914.
    By the mid-1950s, some of the churches had become part of a Progressive Primitive Baptist movement, and the Mount Pleasant Association eventually split into three different associations.
   
Foot washing
    One thing that continues to distinguish them from other Baptists is the practice of foot washing. Various congregations conduct this rite monthly, quarterly or annually as part of services that also include communion.
    “That’s part of what makes us, us,” Samuels said.
    “Girded” apron-like with a large towel for foot-drying, congregants wash one another’s feet, men washing men’s feet and women washing women’s.
    It is a sign of love for one another, said Annie Jackson Small, a member of New Beth Haven Primitive Baptist Church at Collins in Tattnall County, another Mount Pleasant member congregation.
    “It shows obedience to what Christ said,” is explanation enough for Samuels. “He said you ought to do it, in John 13.”
    In addition to foot washing pans and an altar table with bread and wine, the exhibit includes an antique pulpit from Eden Primitive Baptist Church, active from the late 1800s until 2004 in what is now Candler County. Small’s great-grandfather, Abraham Jackson, was founding pastor at Eden and the original Beth Haven.
    Mattie Perry, a member of Bethel Primitive Baptist Church in Statesboro, led the breakfast crowd in several old-style, a cappella hymns, beginning with “Father, I Stretch My Hands to Thee.”
    Featured vocalist Yvonne Hodges, who has sung professionally, performed a medley, also without accompaniment. She too is a Primitive Baptist, from the Mount Pisgah congregation at Metter.

Plans for center
    The Primitive Baptist room will be a permanent part of the heritage exhibits at Willow Hill, and plans are being made for a traveling exhibit, Jackson announced.
    In addition to preserving history, the Willow Hill Heritage and Renaissance Center board hopes to host adult education and GED classes, youth mentoring and senior citizens services at the former school, whose existing building dates from 1954.
    Publicity prior to the first festival in 2011 caught the attention of Scott Hoover, an engineer with Nordson Corp., which has recently expanded its factory at Swainsboro. With employees doing some of the work as volunteers, a $63,000 Nordson Corporation Foundation grant has paid for a fire alarm system and a new security system with cameras and will also cover the cost of roof replacement on the back wing, slated to begin within a week.
    “We’ve been quite blessed to be able to get renovations done,” said Commissioner Ray Mosley, a Willow Hill Heritage and Renaissance Center board member. “Nordson Corporation has been a big benefactor.”