Over the years I have asked many pastors from Virginia and the Carolinas if they have visited the site of the Sandy Creek Baptist Church: the North Carolina home of Shubal Sterns. I have often heard they had. But I don’t know of a single person, besides myself, who has driven the few miles over to Jersey Settlement, one of the first ministries of John Gano. The Jersey Baptist Church was established by Gano and others in 1755. It prospered for a while, but facing Indian attacks, Gano moved his family to New York city, where he started the Baptist church there.
More than a hundred years later, on this day in 1874, J. B. Richardson became the pastor at Jersey Settlement. Richardson invited F.M. Jordan to come to preach, and the blessing of Heaven fell. The first night of the special meeting a short message was preached, followed by prayer. The next morning the building was filled with prayer. Jordan wrote: “The whole community was moved by the power of the Holy Ghost. It was difficult to preach, indeed it did not seem to require much preaching; just pray and sing and rejoice. Sunday the last day (the ninth) day of the meeting was a memorable day in the history of the old Jersey Church.” He said there were so many new converts (sixty-seven of them) they marched double-file to the stream where both Richardson and Jordan baptized. He wrote: “There must have been between one and two thousand people present to witness the solemn scene. I would look up occasionally upon the vast assembly, and almost everybody seemed to be bathed in tears of love and gratitude to God for the wonderful displays of his grace and goodness.”
– Adapted from This Day in Baptist History III, David Cummins