Union Baptist Church

Union Baptist Church, Niner Hill, Blackfork, Ohio. Founded in 1819, the congregation traces its roots to the free Black community of Poke Patch on Dirty Face Creek, also known as the Stewart Settlement. Members of this community were active participants in the Underground Railroad, operating a network that aided freedom seekers across southeastern Ohio. Image courtesy Andrea Frohne.

A Busy Junction

Worshippers at Union Baptist Church were active participants in the Underground Railroad. Founded in 1819, the congregation is the longest continuously operating African American church in Ohio, with services continuing today in Blackfork, Lawrence County, Ohio. Professor Wilbur Siebert’s records illuminate Union Baptist as an epicenter of Underground Railroad activity, with numerous conductors of color operating a complex and extended network of clandestine pathways through difficult terrain. Routes into and out of Poke Patch connected to Gallipolis, Rio Grande, Proctorville, Burlington, Ironton, Olive Furnace, Wilkesville, and Berlin Crossroads.

Signature of James B. Stewart, clerk of Union Baptist Church, dated November 1833. James B. Stewart served as the clerk of Union Baptist Church, maintaining it meeting minutes in a leather-bound journal, which dates to the founding of the church in 1819. Image courtesy: Andrew Feight, Ph.D. for the Appalachian Freedom Heritage Tourism Initiative, Shawnee State University Center for Public History.

Siebert noted that, “It is very probable there were no more active workers in the cause than the Stewart family who lived, and some of whom now live, in Greenfield Township, Gallia County.” The Stewarts were literate, free people of color from Powhatan County, Virginia. James B. Stewart (1780–1851) appears in the first Union Baptist Church record entry and again three years later in November 1822. Planning for a new meeting house began in March 1835, and the three Stewart brothers—James B., William, and Richard—were tasked with identifying an ideal piece of land. The new church would be located in Poke Patch and was built on Richard R. “Dickie” Jones’s farm.

The Providence Anti-Slavery Baptist Association

In September 1834, soon after the congregation relocated its place of worship to the Poke Patch settlement, they joined the new Providence Anti-Slavery Baptist Association. The Providence Association, named for Providence Baptist Church in Berlin Crossroads, Jackson County, is recognized today as the first independent Black Baptist association in American history.

In 1835, at the second annual meeting of the Providence Association, leaders and attendees from Union Baptist played a significant role. Union Baptist Elder Robert Townsend served as moderator, presiding over both the meeting and the association for the coming year. The introductory sermon was preached by Elder James B. Stewart of Union Baptist, from Psalm 34, v. 19. Elder Gabriel Hargo of Paint Creek in Gallipolis offered the prayer. The Black-run, Black-founded association created an intertwined regional network that moved freedom seekers through the iron furnace region of Lawrence, Gallia, and Jackson Counties to safety further north. Theological scholar Henry Mitchell notes, “It was a foregone conclusion that any church in the Providence Association north of the Ohio River was a stop or station on the Underground Railroad.”

Members of the Coker family became conductors and were baptized at Union Baptist Church after their arrival from Tennessee in 1841. Another conductor and church moderator was James Craddolph, who led an extraordinary life. Known as Old Man Craddolph, he was formerly enslaved as part of John Ward’s holdings in Pittsylvania County, Virginia, and was freed as instructed by Ward’s will in 1826. Seventy of Ward’s freed slaves resettled in Lawrence County, Ohio. Craddolph became a conductor on the Underground Railroad, first appearing in Union Baptist church minutes in 1849 and 1850. He married Mariah Stewart, sister to the Stewart brothers.

Historical Photo of Union Baptist Church, when located on the Keels Farm, Blackfork, Ohio. Union Baptist’s log church built on the Keels Farm (constructed, 1879). Pictured, standing in front of the church, from the left: Gordon Keels Sr., Nicey Scott, Elmer Mathews, and Fitz Keels. Image courtesy the Wilma McDaniel Fox Collection, published in R. D. Dunn, Bits and Pieces of Blackfork (2006).

Asbury Parker and the Ironton Network

Asbury Parker, freedom seeker. After escaping his enslaver at Clinton Furnace in Kentucky, Parker passed through Poke Patch, receiving aid from “Old Man Craddolph” and others. He then traveled by train to Columbus and continued on foot to Sandusky, before securing passage by boat to Canada.

In 1857, James Craddolph provided shelter and aid to Asbury Parker, who escaped from his enslaver at Clinton Furnace, near modern-day Ashland, Kentucky. Parker received assistance from a network that connected the Stewart Settlement (Poke Patch) to the Black community of Ironton, which worked with white allies in the city, including John Campbell, Hiram Campbell, and John Peters, as well as noted Black conductors James Ditcher (known as the “Red Fox”) and Gabe N. Johnson, the famous Ironton barber who helped direct the city’s Underground Railroad operations in the 1850s. Asbury Parker would recall: “The old man took me in. I was dressed in black broad cloth. I’d left off my Kentucky jeans. The old man told me I could travel in broad daylight if I’d hold up my head and act free. He conducted me over into the Stewart settlement (Poke Patch) that night, and we got there at one or two o’clock in the morning, and I got my breakfast there.”

Gabe Johnson, who had helped conduct Asbury Parker through Ironton, later identified “John J. Stewart and Eliza his wife” as two of the “most conspicuous characters and ardent workers in what was known as the Underground Railroad of the ante-bellum days.” John J. Stewart “managed the Galia Furnace, which was owned by a group of white men,” known to be abolitionists and personally involved in Underground Railroad activity. Working with Rev. William Stewart, John’s brother, who served Macedonia Baptist Church near Burlington, Ohio, the extended Stewart family and other members of Union Baptist Church helped hundreds of unnamed freedom seekers on their journeys to liberty.

Free people of color and members of Union Baptist Church, the Stewarts were among the most active conductors in southeastern Ohio’s Underground Railroad network, assisting freedom seekers along routes linking Lawrence, Gallia, and surrounding counties. Image courtesy Wilbur H. Siebert, Mysteries of Ohio’s Underground Railroads (1951).

In 1878, James Ditcher recalled in an interview with the Ironton Register: “From 1855 to 1860, I was largely connected with the underground railway. I must have taken through nearly 300 slaves in that time. The route we’d take was to Olive Furnace, or Squire Stewart’s in Symmes Township [a few miles south of today’s Union Baptist Church] then to Noah Nooks at Berlin Crossroads [in Jackson County], and from there to Wilkesville in Vinton County.”

Eliza Stewart recalled that the first freedom seeker she assisted in Poke Patch was named Wilson. He arrived in the spring of 1844, having fled from Virginia. He stopped at the Stewarts’ “house for a day and at night her husband together with the other Stewart brothers piloted him to Berlin Cross Roads, in Jackson County, Ohio — a place where a large number of free colored people had settled many years before.”

Runaway Notice for Henry and Daniel Hutchinson (26 December 1861). This notice appeared in the Gallipolis Journal on December 26th, 1861. Though eventually captured, Henry Hutchinson would return to the Poke Patch community in 1863 before enlisting in the Union army.

Henry Hutchinson and Community Settlement

Another documented freedom seeker who received aid and eventually settled in the community was Henry Hutchinson. He first came to Poke Patch in 1861, following his escape from George Moore’s River View plantation in Mason County, (West) Virginia. During his initial journey north, Henry was captured and taken back to his enslaver. His capture followed an announcement of a $200 reward, published in the Gallipolis Journal. The notice described Henry as 22 years old and “about 5 feet 8 inches in height.” A brother named Daniel, who escaped with him was said to be 25 years old and of the same height. Ultimately freed in 1863, Henry first moved to Gallipolis, bringing his father Daniel Hutchinson and stepmother Parmelia. That same year, Henry took up residence near Oak Hill on a farm in Madison Township, Jackson County, just over the county line from the Blackfork and Poke Patch settlements. He soon left to fight for the Union Army in the Civil War, and upon his return expanded his landholdings. One of his daughters, Ada Hutchinson, married into the Coker family and lived in Poke Patch until 1965; another daughter, Saloma, married the grandson of Old Man James Craddolph.

Migration to Michigan

Between 1855 and 1858, at least thirty families left Poke Patch for Cass County, Michigan. They became involved with Chain Lake Baptist Church in Calvin Township, Cass County, after the Michigan Antislavery Baptist Association formed in 1853. Dozens of Stewart, Dungey, Coker, and Chavous family members are buried in the historic Michigan church cemetery, and descendants live in Cass County to this day.

Others stayed behind, and with the abolition of slavery, African American migration from the southern states into Ohio continued in the late 1860s and 1870s, with new families adding to the growth of the community. In 1879, the Union Baptist congregation constructed a new log church on the Keels farm in Greenfield Township, Gallia County, with baptisms continuing to be held in nearby Dirty Face Creek. As industry developed down the road in Blackfork, Lawrence County, the congregation moved again, constructing today’s house of worship between Poke Patch and Blackfork to serve people of color in both settlements. The current church building on Niner Hill opened in 1919. The original bell from the Keels Farm church that once called worshippers is now installed in the bell tower of the present building. It rings of freedom to this day.

A “Geography of Resistance”

Recognized by the National Park Service’s Network to Freedom, Union Baptist Church represents one of the institutional anchors of the Black-founded Providence Anti-Slavery Baptist Association. Through that association, rural black communities in the foothills of southeastern Ohio were knit together with urban Black communities along the Ohio River at Gallipolis, Burlington, Ironton, and Portsmouth, forming bonds of trust, lines of communication, and practices of mutual aid that were essential to Underground Railroad operations.

As historian Cheryl LaRoche has described in her concept of a “geography of resistance,” rural free black settlements, with their church congregations, kinship ties, and deep religious convictions, forged a network that aided freedom seekers who had escaped into Appalachian Ohio. The pastors and members of Union Baptist Church nurtured and sustained that network, linking Poke Patch (the Stewart Settlement) to a broader regional system of Black leadership and mutual aid. Today, the church endures as a testament to a rural Black community whose faith, courage, and resolve helped shape the history of freedom in the United States of America.