On this day in 1781, the Severns Valley Baptist Church was founded in what is now Elizabethtown, Kentucky, south of Louisville. It may have been the first Baptist church in Kentucky. At the time, the area was dense and unexplored forest, inhabited by only a few pioneering families. If we could go back to visit one of their services, we’d find the men dressed in leather leggings, moccasins, carrying hats made of various animal skins. And in their hands or resting close by would be their Kentucky long rifles and a tomahawk. There would be a guard at the door watching for Indians.
John Gerrard was the first pastor at Severns Valley. We don’t know a great deal about this man, but we do know that after serving the church for about a year, he went out to hunt food for his family, and we know he never returned. The forests were filled with game, but also with natives who didn’t want the White men living there. The body of Pastor Gerrard was never found, and it was believed that he was murdered. J.H. Spencer, author of an interesting history of the early Baptists of Kentucky, wrote, “Like John the Baptist, he came preaching in the wilderness, and like Moses, no man knoweth of his sepulcher until this day.”