The Church
On the fourth Sunday in August,
1791, nine settlers and two Baptist ministers established the Old Baptist
Church on the Dryridge
between the present day communities of Dry Ridge and Williamstown in Grant
County, Kentucky. The church first met
at a block house called Campbell’s
Station and in 1799 a meeting house was built in the vicinity of the
blockhouse.
The church, which had by 1818 added
“Predestinarian” to its name suffered a severe setback in its membership in
June, 1817, when sixteen of its congregation were dismissed from the church for
adopting the doctrine of Free-Will.
Those eleven organized a new church which was initially called the Baptist Church at the Dry Ridge, Free Will. The predestinarians suffered an additional
loss in membership when sixteen members of the congregation left to organize
the Old Baptist Church
at Fork Lick.
Because the church’s membership was
in a state of continuing decline and its identity being threatened by the
growth of the Free
Will Baptist
Church, the church
reorganized in November 1826 in nearby Williamstown as the Williamstown Church
of Christ, Particular Baptist. The
church existed in that form and location until the dedication of a new building
(the current one) on June 26, 1892, in Dry Ridge. It had been contemplated that the entire
congregation would move to the new church building and worship as the
Williamstown Church of Christ, Particular Baptist, at Dry Ridge but as the
construction of the new church building was nearing completion, several members
of the congregation who resided near the Williamstown location decided to
continue to worship at the old location.
The concept of one congregation with two meeting houses was formalized
by joint resolutions in 1897 and that mode of worship was continued until 1919
when the Williamstown location was closed.
By the late 1940s, the church which
had in the meantime adopted the name, the Dry Ridge Church of Christ, Primitive
Baptist, and which was more commonly known as the Dry Ridge Primitive Baptist
Church, began to depart
from some of the more conservative aspects of its earlier traditions. For example, it began to conduct services on
the third Sunday of each month rather than only on the first Sunday as had been
traditional. Further, a piano and later
an electric organ were introduced despite the Primitive Baptist tradition of
non-toleration of musical instruments in its services. An increasingly better educated congregation
began to be dissatisfied with lay ministers, there being no Primitive Baptist
seminaries to provide a source of trained ministers. Finally, in 1974, unable to find a suitable
Primitive Baptist minister, the church contacted the Louisville Presbytery of
the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) and arranged for students from the
Presbyterian Seminary to fill the pulpit on a temporary basis. Recognizing that Primitive Baptists and
Presbyterians were both Calvinistic in faith and belief, the congregation
formally affiliated with The Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) on June 1, 1975,
and remains affiliated to this day.
While originally under the jurisdiction of the Louisville Presbytery,
the church eventually transferred to the Cincinnati Presbytery due to
geographical considerations.
The Elder
William Conrad was born on December
6, 1797 in Harrison County on Twin Creek, a tributary of the South Fork
of the Licking River. He was reasonably well educated for the time
in primitive schools in Harrison
County. In December, 1823, he apprenticed himself to
a James McMurtry of Harrison
County to learn the trade
of tanning. Freed from the
apprenticeship in August, 1817, he married Elizabeth Boyers and they moved to
eight and a half acres of land in what was then Pendleton, now Grant, County where
he built a log dwelling and a tannery.
William eventually became a farmer
and acquired over twelve hundred acres of prime farmland which he very
successfully farmed with his five sons and seven slaves. William was a multi-faceted and versatile individual
who, in addition to his farming and tannery business, found time to operate a
distillery, pastor four churches simultaneously, dispense homemade remedies to
his ailing neighbors and friends, make several tours of the frontier
territories, and publish a book on theology.
William’s greatest calling in life
was his ministry. William joined the Old Baptist
Church on the Dryridge in
September, 1820. He was among the seven
members who reorganized the church as the Williamstown Church of Christ, Particular
Baptist in 1826. William was ordained by
the congregation in April, 1827, and was its minister continuously from that
time until 1881, the year before his death.
In addition to serving as a minister of that church, he also
concurrently served as minister of the Fork
Lick Church
in Grant County
(thirty years), minister of the Twin Creek Church
in Harrison County
(twenty-nine years) and minister of the Ray’s Fork
Church in Scott County
(forty years). All of these churches
were what would later become more commonly known as Primitive Baptist
Churches. From the time of his
ordination Mr. Conrad was always referred to as Elder William Conrad, the term
“Elder” being the title favored for ordained ministers of the Primitive Baptist
persuasion. Interestingly, William
Conrad never received any compensation for his ministry at any of his churches.
The Emancipationist
Cassius Marcellus Clay, one of Kentucky’s
most interesting citizens, had all but been forgotten by history, until William
Townsend of Lexington
resurrected his memory in a famous speech about Clay before the Chicago Civil
War Round Table in October 1953. Keven
McQueen, one of Clay’s biographers described Clay as follows:
He was one of the few Southern emancipationists in
the years preceding the Civil War. He
was in President Lincoln’s cabinet as Minister to Russia. He was a fiery orator, a bold duelist and
fighter, a celebrated soldier, a controversial newspaper editor, a shrewd
politician, and one of the most lauded and reviled men of his time.
Clay was born on October 19, 1810,
in Madison County at the family’s famous Clermont
(later renamed White Hall) home. He was
the son of famous pioneer Green Clay and Sally Lewis Clay.
Cassius first attended the Jesuit
College of St. Joseph in Bardstown and later attended Transylvania
University in Lexington before transferring to Yale as a
junior where he majored in oratory.
While at Yale, Clay attended a
speech by the famous emancipationist, William Floyd Garrison. The speech made such an impression on Clay
that he resolved to, in his words, “give slavery a death struggle.” Clay’s father had died in 1828 and in his
will freed some of the family’s slaves, providing them money and land in Tennessee. The remainder of the family slaves were left to
Cassius by will, some in trust to Cassius for his heirs. Beginning in the early 1840s Cassius freed
all the family slaves except those who had been left to him in trust, that
trust status preventing him from legally freeing them. At about the same time, he bought and freed
thirteen more slaves to preclude families being separated.
After his graduation from Yale in
1832, Clay returned to Kentucky, reenrolled at
Transylvania to study law and married Mary
Jane Warfield. By 1835, he was serving
in the Kentucky House of Representatives.
Politics and his emancipationist
stand led to a series of duels and fights for which Cassius is perhaps best
known. He first fought a dual with
Robert Wickliffe on May 13, 1841, at Locust Grove in Louisville.
Shots were exchanged at ten paces with neither party being wounded. His next two engagements would not end so
benignly. The Wickliffe
family hired a thug named Samuel Brown to attack Clay at a political rally at
Russell’s Cave Spring near Lexington
on August 1, 1843. Brown attempted to
shoot Clay with a pistol but his shot struck the handle of Clay’s knife beneath
his coat. Clay then used his knife to
inflict massive wounds to Brown’s head and face.
On June 15, 1849, Clay was attacked
by a mob while giving a speech at Foxtown in Madison County. Clay used his by now famous Bowie knife to
mortally wound his principal adversary, Cyrus Turner.
On June 3, 1845, Clay launched “The
True American”, a weekly emancipationist newspaper in Lexington.
However, in mid-August, while Clay was desperately ill with typhoid
fever, a pro-slavery mob stormed the newspaper’s offices and dismantled the
press. Clay continued to publish the
newspaper in Cincinnati
until he volunteered to fight in the Mexican War.
In 1846, Clay helped organize the 1st
Kentucky Volunteers, consisting primarily of soldiers from Fayette, Bourbon,
and Madison Counties. Clay was elected Captain of his company. Unfortunately, his Mexican service consisted
primarily of being captured and held prisoner for about eight months until the
war ended.
While giving speeches in Springfield, Illinois,
in 1854, Clay met and talked at length about emancipation with Abraham Lincoln,
whose wife, Mary Todd, was a childhood friend of Clay’s wife. This contact and Clay’s popularity in the
North resulted in his being seriously considered as a Republican nominee for
Vice President on Lincoln’s
ticket in 1860 and subsequently for the position of Secretary of War. However, it was determined that such
nomination or appointment would unduly enrage southern slaveholders. Instead, he was offered and accepted the
position of Minister to Russia
where he served from 1861 to 1869. While
in Russia, Clay succeeded in
preventing Russia
from recognizing or assisting the Confederacy.
He also was instrumental in acquiring Alaska
from Russia.
Clay’s wife and family had
originally accompanied Clay to Russia
but returned to Kentucky
within a few months, his wife not finding the Russian climate agreeable. Upon Clay’s return to Kentucky, relations with his wife were
strained. This strain was exacerbated in
1871 when a four year old Russian boy was delivered to Clay at White Hall. Clay adopted the child and it has always been
generally assumed that the child was Clay’s illegitimate son by a Russian
woman. Two weeks later Clay’s wife and
children moved to Lexington
and the Clays were divorced a few years later.
Clay’s later years were lonely ones,
with Clay and the Russian boy living alone at White Hall. The loneliness was briefly interrupted by Clay’s
marriage on November 13, 1894 at age eighty-four to Dora Richardson, age 15, a
marriage that scandalized the local community.
The marriage was not to last as Dora, while maintaining great affection
for Cassius, left White Hall on July 3, 1897, and they were divorced a year
later.
Clay remained hardy in his old age,
as demonstrated by his killing two men who broke into his home in October
1899. But hardy as he was, he finally
died on July 22, 1903, at ninety-two years of age. The Louisville Courier-Journal wrote:
By some he was loved, by others he was hated, but by
all he was feared and by most he was respected.
He made his mark in whatever department of life he was thrown …. He rode roughshod and cared not a whit whose
toes were injured in the riding. He was
editor, politician, duelist, author, and statesman, and acted each part with an
originality and spice which lent him new interest.
The Connecting Event
Lloyd W. Franks, a then Elder in the
Dry Ridge Presbyterian Church and professor of history at Thomas More
College, edited and
published The Journal of Elder William Conrad in 1976. Something in his research for that
publication must have given Franks, long since deceased, reason to believe that
there was some connection or relationship between William Conrad and Cassius
Marcellus Clay beyond a rather unflattering reference to Clay in an undated
entry in the Conrad journal:
I[t] has indeed become a sad state of affairs when
the question of servitude has become the domain or [sic] rascally politicians
who will stop at nothing to get votes and thus be elected to an office. Many who call themselves abolitionists and
have spoken out against servitude have no interest in the servant or his wretched
state, but wish only to excite feelings of hatred to be used for personal
gain. Mr. C.M. Clay of Lexington prints a newspaper which speaks out
against black bondage as he calls it, but yet owns many servants of colour. This vile wretch speaks of the equality of
all men, yet he has provoked and killed several by the knife who have dared to
speak out against his byased [sic] opinions and evil deeds.
While this journal entry is undated,
by Conrad’s reference to Clay’s newspaper, the entry can be approximately dated
to the period, June 3, 1845, to June 7, 1846, the period during which Clay
edited The True American.
Franks requested and was finally
granted an interview on October 8, 1976, with Mary Esther Warfield Bennett,
Cassius Clay’s great-granddaughter, in whose possession Clay’s unpublished
daily memorandum books resided. Miss
Bennett related in her own words the following:
According to family history Cassius M. Clay has once
heard Elder William Conrad speak at the Baptist
Church in Lexington when it was under the pastorship of
Elder William Moody Pratt. It seems that
Elder William Conrad and Cassius M. Clay became acquainted although they
disagreed considerably over slavery and the question of freeing the blacks. They were nevertheless personal friends. Elder Conrad asked Mr. Clay concerning church
membership and if he was a member of any church. Mr. Clay replied that he was not a member of
a church but that his beliefs leaned toward that of the Old Baptist faith. Mr. Clay once considered becoming a member of
the Cane Spring
Baptist Church
in Madison County, but because of the pro-slavery
attitude of the congregation, he felt that he was not welcome there although he
frequently attended the services at that church. Cane
Spring Baptist
Church is located in Eastern Madison
County not far from Estill County. Mr. Clay was, as we know, an abolitionist and
had made many enemies in his anti-slavery stand. He was much interested in Elder Conrad’s
concepts of slavery because Elder Conrad completely separated the issue of
slavery from that of the Scriptures when he stated that slavery was neither
upheld or condemned by the Bible. This
to Mr. Clay was a most unusual stand for that day and time, who did not accept
this view but he considered Elder Conrad one of the most enlightened men that
he had ever met. Elder Conrad, he said,
has a tolerance for other peoples’ opinions that are not the same as his own,
even though he holds fast to his convictions.
Nevertheless, he feels that every person is entitled to his own opinion
and he feels that every person has a right to live his life as he sees fit.
After these remarks, Miss Bennett
allowed Mr. Franks to record an entry dated August 4, 1856, in one of Clay’s
memorandum books:
Some past months ago I was journeying to Cincinnati to address a
contingent of the free-soil party of that fair city which was to assemble at
the Burnett home. Having decided to
curtail the length of my journey by transversing the dry ridge, I was prevailed
upon to speak to a small gathering of persons assembled at Williamstown. Having thus spoken with little ado, I
proceeded northward astride my faithful mount where I was joined a few leagues
northward of the village by William Conrad, known to many of the good citizens
as Uncle Billy, a large land owner, a minister of the Old Baptist Church of
that locale and I regret to say, a slave owner.
Notwithstanding our differences over involuntary servitude, we continued
our journey forthwith, notwithstanding a thorough castigation of my various
experiences in knife-fighting by my companion.
Mr. Conrad, although a slave owner, is a man of peace and he earnestly
endeavored to persuade me to cease and desist from what he calls “living by the
sword”. We had traveled but a short
distance when we were set upon by ruffians intending upon maiming if not
destroying me. I had upon my person my
favorite knife, which I quickly reached for as to defend myself and my
companion, but Mr. Conrad urged me to put away my weapon and he turned and
spoke to our would-be assassins.
“Gentlemen, Mr. Clay is a so-journer in our land, and moreover he is
going to take food and lodging with myself and wife. Pray leave us in peace.” One of the men replied “We will leave you in
peace if you say so, Uncle Billy, and we will trouble you no more.” Mr. Conrad proceeded to escort me to his
spacious home where I supped and lodged under his kind roof. Before retiring, I asked if there was any way
by which I could express my appreciation for his intervention earlier that
evening. He replied that as a child of
God it was his duty and privilege to be a friend to all men and that no
compensation as to his person would be accepted. Being deeply touched by this gesture I
inquired as to his congregation of Old Baptist at Williamstown, asking as to
anything lacking. Having been answered
in the negative, I next inquired if the congregation would accept a small organ
as a token of appreciation. He replied
that although it was not the custom for Old Baptist to use musical instruments
as a part of their worship, nothing in the church doctrine forbade such. Thus, I pledged to myself to call upon the
organ builders of Hook and Hastings in Philadelphia
upon my next journey to that city to build a small organ of pipes for the Old Baptist
Church at Williamstown of
which I would bear the expenses thereof.
Upon having allowed Franks to read
the aforesaid passage from the memorandum book, Miss Bennett inquired as to
whether the organ had in fact ever been delivered to the church. Franks advised that there was no indication
that any organ had ever been delivered to the church. Upon hearing this, Miss Bennett advised that
she, as a descendant of Clay, would like to make a donation to the church in
the name of the Clay descendants in lieu of the organ promised some one hundred
twenty years earlier. Miss Bennett
caused a legal document to be drawn up (copy attached as Enclosure “A”)
evidencing that the Dry Ridge Presbyterian Church released the Clay family from
Cassius Clay’s pledge of the organ in consideration of the gift of $300.00 to
be used for the restoration of the church premises. Miss Clay, knowing of the plans for the
church to build an addition to the church building, advised that she would make
a further contribution toward that addition.
While this writer has been unable to determine the additional amount
contributed to the church, it was said to have been substantial.
Epilogue
While this would appear to be the
end of this little historical vignette, there was to be yet another chapter.
Lloyd Franks had determined,
apparently from the archived records of the then defunct Hook & Hastings,
the organ company in Boston mentioned by Clay in
his memorandum entry, that Cassius Clay had, in fact, purchased an organ from
that company on March 2, 1877, which organ was subsequently installed in the Remapo
Presbyterian Church in Hilburn,
New York in 1890. A friend, knowing of Franks’ interest in the
Remapo organ, advised Franks in 1984 that the Remapo Church
had moved to a new location and that the old organ was for sale. Franks purchased the organ and had it
installed in the Dry Ridge Presbyterian Church where it remains to this day.
Was this the organ that Clay
intended to be given to the Old
Baptist Church
at Williamstown and if so, why the delay from its pledge in 1856 to its
purchase twenty-one years later in 1877?
And why and how did the organ end up in the Remapo Presbyterian Church
thirteen years after it was purchased by Clay?
And where was the organ during those intervening thirteen years? There are no answers to these questions. One would like to think, however, that
Cassius Clay would be pleased and perhaps amused that the organ finally
arrived, even though one hundred twenty-eight years late. |
