Cashaway Baptist Church

 

The Cashaway Church was founded in 1756 as an offshoot of the Welsh Neck Baptist Church, which was established in the 1730s.  The church was located at the base of the Cashaway Neck on the east side of the Great Pee Dee River in what is now Marlboro County.  Its members included some of the most prominent settlers on the upper Pee Dee River, including Robert Lide, Evan Pugh, and Johannes Kolb.  The Church was a hub of the colonial community on both sides of the Pee Dee River north of Black Creek and south of Long Bluff.  Its activities for nearly 40 years are well documented in its contemporary minutes and in the diaries of Evan Pugh. 

Professor Stephen Marini of Wellesley College focused on the Cashaway Church in his recently published book The Cashaway Psalmody: Transatlantic Religion and Music in Colonial Carolina (University of Illinois Press 2020).  A skirmish between Tory and Whig militia took place at Cashaway Church in April 1781.

The Cashaway Church was abandoned in the years after the Revolution, and by 1790 it had moved across the river to what is now Darlington County and became known as the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church.  The Cashaway Church site therefore offers a nicely contained window into the formative Colonial period of the Upper Pee Dee, and also could provide valuable information with regard to the configuration of an unaltered non-Anglican colonial church.

Nothing is known about the size or appearance of the Cashaway Church, and in addition, its graveyard (which contains the graves of many of these significant settlers listed above) has not been surveyed and definitively demarcated.  The archaeological work on the site had two (2) main objectives:

  • Establishment of the boundaries of the Cashaway Church cemetery; and

  • Location of the adjacent site of the Cashaway Church and establishment of its size and orientation.

Work began in January of 2022 at the Cashaway site and will continue through 2022. A final report will be uploaded and accessible at the close of the project.

This project was supported by the Florence County Museum.