I have told parts of this story several times, so I won’t go into any great deal of detail on this occasion.
A few years ago, when our son and his family were living in Akin, South Carolina, my wife, Judy, and I drove a few miles across the Savanna River into Georgia, and there in the country-side just north of Augusta, we were able to locate the original Kiokee Baptist Church. For a few minutes we walked around an ancient, sturdy building and looked at several nearby gravestones, some of which were over two hundred years old, including some which memorialized the name “Marshall.”
On this day in 1771, after ministering in South Carolina for a while, Daniel Marshall established the first permanent Baptist church in the Province of Georgia, at Kiokee. He pastored the small congregation, for about fourteen years before his life’s work came to an end, and he was succeeded by his son, Abraham. Fourteen years before the founding of the church, a Georgia law prohibited any religious worship which was not “according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England,” but Marshall followed the laws of a more Heavenly King, and as a result the Kiokee Baptist Church still flourishes just a few hundred yards from the humble building in which the Marshalls preached the gospel of Christ to some of the first settlers in Georgia.