Major Bibliographical References (Cite the books, articles, and other sources used in preparing this form on one or more continuation sheets.) Previous documentation on file (NPS): Primary location of additional data: - preliminary determination of individual listing (36 - State Historic Preservation Office CFR 67) has been requested - Other State agency - previously listed in the National Register - Federal agency - previously determined eligible by the National _ Local government Register - University - designated a National Historic Landmark x Other - recorded by Historic American Buildings Survey Vame of repository #. Union Baptist Church archives _ recorded by Historic American Engineering Record #. NPS Form 10-900 (Rev.
10-90) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Section number _8 Page1 OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Union Baptist Church New Bedford (Bristol), MA The Union Baptist Church is historically significant as an enduring religious institution associated with New Bedford's people of color and their role in the history of the city. The church is the outgrowth of the city's oldest African American church and as its only African American Baptist congregation. It is the successor of the New Bedford church most closely associated with fugitives from American slavery, who formed an unusually large proportion of the local population of African descent. Some of those surviving fugitives and their descendants helped found Union Baptist in 1895.
In addition, its congregation included a notable number of Cape Verdeans, who, by marrying African American members of the congregation, abandoned their native Catholicism and served as exceptions to the separation popularly perceived to exist between the two groups. The church is also architecturally significant. With its cornerstone laid in 1899, the building was designed by Nathaniel Cannon Smith, New Bedford's most prominent architect at the turn of the 20" century. One of Smith's very rare commissions for a religious facility, the church was designed in Smith's characteristic Shingle Style with Colonial Revival features. The sanctuary has an auditorium plan with an open truss-work ceiling and large arched window on a street facade. The complex, modern, plan includes assembly and meeting rooms, as well as a secondary spaces and two entry vestibules.
Union Baptist Church retains integrity of location, setting, design, feeling, and association and thus meets National Register Criteria A and C at the local level, as well as Criteria Consideration A for a religious property. HISTORICAL BACKGROUND As its name suggests, Union Baptist Church reunified two African American Baptist congregations that had split nearly four decades earlier. The first of those, Second Baptist Church, itself split off from New Bedford's earliest African American church, African (later Third) Christian Church, founded in 1826 by African American members of the city's First Christian Church.' In 1844 nineteen members of this church left to form the second congregation to affiliate with the Baptist Church in the city, and was the first Baptist church founded by and for people of African descent.
According to one local historian, these nineteen left because they "held sentiments of Calvinist Baptists," presumably among them the notion of predestination, of inevitable salvation for the elect and damnation for all others. Beyond that belief, why these people of African descent should have chosen to become a Baptist congregation is unclear. Since the Revolutionary era, Baptists and Methodists were the most apt of all denominations to proselytize among and accept people of color for membership, and the Baptist church had developed an early foothold in Boston. Founded in 1805, the African Meeting House was the first African Baptist church in the North, and the first African American church in the city.
Moreover, African American Baptist churches had existed in the South since the Revolution, and the notably large number of southern-born African Americans in 19"h -century New Bedford had a significant role in the church's founding, population, and persistence? Local historians have identified fifteen of the nineteen founders of Second Baptist Church - Richard and Martha Johnson, Levin and Harriet Betts, Sarah Quinn, Henry (later William Henry) and Hannah Johnson, John Butler, Peter and Agnes (continued) ' Third Christian Church closed in 1859. In its last years it became known as Free Will Baptist Church. See Leonard Bolles Ellis, History of New Bedford and Its Vicinity, 1602-1892 (Syracuse, NY: D. Mason & Co., 1892), 563-64. 2"History of the New Bedford Churches: Second Baptist (Colored)," New Bedford Standard, 5 October 1854, 2:4. 3Walter H.
Brooks, "Evolution of the Negro Baptist Church," Journal of Negro History 7, 1 (1922): 17. NPS Form 10-900 (Rev. 10-90) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Section number _8 Page _2 OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Union Baptist Church New Bedford (Bristol), MA Nelson, Elizabeth Williamson, William and Amelia Piper, and the Pipers' daughters Amelia Piper and Sarah Piper Roshur. All but Hannah Johnson, who was a Massachusetts native and a Narragansett Indian, had been born in the South; of the thirteen who came from the South, five were from Richmond, Virginia, where an African Baptist Missionary Society had been formed in 1815.4 From the beginning Second Baptist Church was intimately associated with people enslaved in the South who had escaped to the North.
Among the founders, William Henry Johnson and his mother Harriet Betts, probably the family of William Piper, and possibly others were fugitives, and the church's first two pastors were as well. The first, Thomas U. Allen, had been a minister of Richmond's First African Baptist Church until 1843, when the congregation granted his request to move to Boston to work as a "foreign missionary." At that time, according to church minutes, "Bro. Allen is the property of an orphan child whose guardian has obtained leave of the Court to dispose of him for the sum of $600," and the congregation pledged to contribute what it could to purchase his freedom. Allen left the South before he had raised the money, and was thus still enslaved when he came to New Bedford.S When Allen left Second Baptist Church in 1847, the fugitive Edmund Kelley succeeded him.
Kelley left a Baptist church in Columbia, Tennessee, under circumstances very similar to Allen's: upon learning that Kelley was "about to be sold," his congregation tried unsuccessfully to purchase his freedom. He left Tennessee with a note from his insolvent owner that he might preach anywhere in the United States, on the condition that he return when called to do so. Kelley headed for Boston, and he accepted the ministry at New Bedford's Second Baptist in September 1848. His congregation in Tennessee afterward helped him buy his wife and four children out of slavery; in fact, Kelley resigned his New Bedford pastorate on 1 May 1851 "in order to secure the freedom of my family from slavery," presumably through a fund-raising tour that would take him away from the church too often. His family arrived in New Bedford on 30 May, and the next day Kelley formally married his wife Paralee.
During the 1850s Kelley again served as Second Baptist's pastor for several years, and he died in New Bedford in 1894° After Kelley left, the Second Baptist ministry was filled by visiting pastors, among them in 1851 William Jackson (1819- 1900), who returned as the church's settled minister in 1855. Jackson, who was born free in Norfolk, Virginia, moved to Philadelphia in the early 1840s and became pastor at Oak Street Baptist Church in West Philadelphia in 1842. Though he did mission work with other churches in the region, he remained in his Philadelphia pastorate until 1851, when he came to New Bedford. Jackson's documented involvement with fugitives began about a month after the Fugitive Slave Act (continued) * Brooks, "Negro Baptist Church," 17. Founders are identified in C.
Dudley Onley, "Connectional History," Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Salem Baptist Church, New Bedford, Mass. 1858-1883. December 7 to 12 (New Bedford: Sherman & Purrington, printers, 1885), unpaginated. 5 Minutes of First African Baptist Church, Richmond, VA, 5 March 1843, Library of Virginia, Richmond. The minutes of 6 April 1845 state that Allen's resignation as a deacon of the Richmond church had been approved, that he apparently was not to be sent as "a missionary to Africa," and that "he had found employment as a pastor in New Bedford Mass." " A Family Redeemed from Bondage; Being Rev. Edmond Kelley, (the Author), His Wife, and Four Children (New Bedford: Published by the Author, Corner of Cedar and Middle Streets, 1851) recounts his bondage, escape, and life in freedom. See Massachusetts Vital Statistics for his New Bedford marriage and death records. NPS Form 10-900 (Rev.
10-90) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Section number 8 Page 3 OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Union Baptist Church New Bedford (Bristol), MA became law in September 1850, when he was arrested for taking part in an effort to rescue a fugitive named William Henry Taylor. Jackson and others were charged with conspiracy to kidnap Taylor and to convey him to "some unknown quarter" without the consent or knowledge of those "who claimed his legal custody." In a later account of his life Jackson claimed that he led the "rescue party," which had disguised Taylor in women's clothes and moved him on to Canada? Jackson's friends obtained a writ of habeas corpus to secure his release from jail, and he soon after left Philadelphia for Nem Enghaed.
He vay i anal edl docasentr Saindance ti tigüiveh ibe gan al moss i he digtrily ukin amval Thersanga and fifth persons Jackson received into Second Baptist church were Ellen Saunders and Thomas Price, both documented fugitives. Other members identified as fugitives who joined Second or the later Salem Baptist congregations included Ferguson, William Winters, James Pritlow, Anthony Loney, Caroline Martin, Harriet Johnson Betts; in addition Levin Betts, Mary Blair, and Charles and James Thomas were probably fugitives? It is likely that the collection "for the benefit of persons escaping from slavery" in one of the city's churches in December 1855 took place at Second Baptist, and by March 1856 Jackson and several other New Bedford men of color created a "Vigilant Aid Society" to help fugitives passing through or settling in the city.
One of the society's first actions was to castigate publicly Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church for "shutting its doors against a society, which has for its object the fundamental principles of the Gospel, and aids the poor ranting fugitive out of the clutches of wicked human bloodhounds, and given him a crust of bread and a cup of cold water, and bids him God speed on his way from the prison-house of bondage."º Jackson's journal makes clear that he knew Philadelphia fugitive assistant William Still, and it is probable that he worked with Still to move fugitives northward.
His journal entry for 14 June 1857 probably documents his involvement in one fugitive case: "I have dureing [sic] the past week been very successful in helping two men to obtain their freedom one from Washington [sic] and one from Kentuckey [sic] ."' Jackson's churches, both Second Baptist and Salem Baptist, appear to have been the churches of choice for New Bedford's fugitive population, which by most accounts ranged from three hundred to seven hundred." Philadelphia Ledger quoted in National Anti-Slavery Standard, 24 October 1850; thanks to Christopher Densmore, Friends Historical Library, Swarthmore, PA, for this article; e-mail to author, 8 April 2005. William Jackson, "A Memoir of William Jackson," excerpt from William Jackson to Rev. Edgar M. Levy, 8 March 1899, private collection. Levy was one of the men who secured the writ to release Jackson.
& On Jackson's installation, see New Bedford Republican Standard, 12 April 1855 Standard, 2:4, and 19 April 1855, 2:3. ° On Saunders, see William Still, The Underground Railroad (1871; reprint, Chicago: Johnson Publishing Co., 1970), 281-85; on Price see New Bedford Overseers of the Poor Records, 1:123, New Bedford Free Public Library; on Pritlow see F. N. Boney et al., God Made Man, Man Made the Slave: The Autobiography of George Teamoh (Macon, GA: Mercer University Press, 1990), 109; on Winters see Horatio T. Strothers, The Underground Railroad in Connecticut (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1962), 104. On Loney see Still, Underground Railroad, 114; on Martin see Still, Underground Railroad, 336-46.
Harriet Johnson Betts was the enslaved mother of William Henry Johnson, who escaped with him from Richmond in 1833; see Johnson's obituary in New Bedford Evening Standard, 19 December 1896. On Ferguson see the account of his escape and life in New Bedford Standard Times, 15 May 1910, and New Bedford Overseers of the Poor Records, 1:122. Like Kelley, Ferguson formally married his wife Nancy, with whom he escaped, in New Bedford in 1850. 1º See "Public Meetings," Liberator, 14 March 1856. " Kathryn Grover, The Fugitive's Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001), 255-56.
12 Many contemporary accounts cite the great number of fugitives in New Bedford, but specific estimates appear in "A City of Refuge," Boston Chronotype, reprinted in New Bedford Republican Standard, 1 November 1850; Caroline Weston, New Bedford, to Wendell Phillips, 9 February 1845, Anti-Slavery Collection, Department of Rare Books and Manuscripts, Boston Public Library; and James B. Congdon, "The Colored Population of New Bedford," 1863, Paul Cuffe Papers, New Bedford Free Public Library. On NPS Form 10-900 (Rev. 10-90) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Section number 8 Page4 OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Union Baptist Church New Bedford (Bristol), MA In the spring of 1858 a general revival swept over the city's African American churches.
Thirty-two people, of a total of 124 converted during that time, joined Second Baptist, and by the fall its membership stood at 250 people, or roughly a quarter of the official population of color in 1855.'3 But the church was on the brink of schism. That October a faction in the church accused Jackson of financial mismanagement, but a rapidly convened ecclesiastical council of clergy and "lay brethren" ruled that the charge had no foundation and that they saw no reason for him not to remain as Second Baptist's pastor." Still, Jackson resigned about three weeks later, and a letter signed by "75 to 100 persons" asked to be dismissed at the same time. After "sharp discussion," a newspaper account stated, their request was approved.!
In the end ninety- five people from Second Baptist, including some who had founded Second Baptist Church in 1844, left and formed Salem Baptist Church with Jackson as their pastor. By 1885 Salem Baptist Church had 193 members and a very active Sunday School that reached out to the children of nonmembers: it had 155 students and twelve teachers in that year. By the turn of the 20** century the local population of African descent had been supplemented modestly by immigrants from the Cape Verde Islands, an archipelago off the coast of West Africa that had long played a role in both the transatlantic slave trade and the whaling industry. Enslaved Africans were put to work on island plantations, but the dry climate and misuse of agricultural land formed a powerful push to emigrate.
By 1765 American whaling vessels made regular stops at these islands to acquire provisions and recruit crew." The earliest known permanent resident from Cape Verde was Joseph Antone, born in 1797 on the island of Sao Nicolau and who had settled in New Bedford by 1821. Antone was one of the original members of the African Christian Church in 1826. Though Cape Verdeans were relatively common in whaling crews, their settlement in New Bedford was slight until the end of the 1880s, and migration on a large scale did not begin until about 1900. In 1900, just as the truly mass migration from Cape Verde began, there were probably fewer than three hundred Cape Verdeans in Bristol County, whose population of color stood at about 5,700.!
In the language of immigration studies, Cape Verdeans were "sojourners," immigrants who initially came with the intention not to settle but to earn money that would support their families and a better life in their native country. As a consequence, they tended to be male: historian Marilyn Halter has determined through an analysis of passenger and crew lists that 83.4 % of Cape Verdeans coming into New Bedford between 1860 and 1934 were male. Those who chose to (continued) fugitives in New Bedford see Grover, Fugitive's Gibraltar. If there were seven hundred fugitives in New Bedford in 1850, they would have formed an unlikely 70 percent of city's recorded African American population, though many probably escaped the notice of federal census takers.
13 New Bedford Republican Standard, 8 April 1858, 1:2; Onley, "Connectional History." 14 New Bedford Republican Standard, 21 October 1858, 1:5, and 28 October 1858, 3:1. bid.,11 November 1858, 2:1. 1 Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Salem Baptist Church, New Bedford, Mass. 1858-1883. December 7 to 12 (New Bedford: Sherman & Purrington, 1885), unpaginated. See Elmo Paul Hohman, The American Whaleman: A Study of Life and Labor in the Whaling Industry (New York/London/ Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928), 28, and Marilyn Halter, Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860-1965 (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 2-4. 18 See Historical Census Browser, University of Virginia Library Web site, http://fisher.lib.virginia.edu/collections/stats/histcensus.
The 1900 census distinguishes between "negro" population and "all colored population," which latter seems to have included foreign- born people of color. In that year 2,749 "negro" males and females were listed as Bristol County residents, while the "all colored population" was 3,004, a difference of 265 persons. NPS Form 10-900 (Rev. 10-90) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Section number 8 Page 5 OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Union Baptist Church New Bedford (Bristol), MA settle and wished to marry thus encountered a dearth of Cape Verdean females.
In her Folk-lore from the Cape Verde Islands (1923), based on field work in New Bedford and other New England places, the anthropologist Elsie Clews Parsons noted, "As a rule the Island immigrants are married to their own country-women, of whom there are comparatively few, or they live celibate."19 Despite the fact that Cape Verdeans tended to think of themselves as Portuguese upon their arrival in the United States, Catholic churches, and consigned to the same low-wage jobs as African Americans had historically been hey were systematically excluded from institutions created and supported by white Portuguese, including By 1905 Cape Verdeans in New Bedford had founded Our Lady of the Assumption church, the oldest Cape Verdean Catholic church in North America.
But intermarriage with African American women brought Cape Verdean men, and ultimately the children of these couples, into African American Protestant churches. In 1852, for example, the Cape Verdean blacksmith Miguel A. Fortes married Mary Bush, born in the District of Columbia, and the daughter of African American fugitive assistant William Bush. Fortes and his wife were members of Salem Baptist, and in 1872 Miguel Fortes was ordained a deacon of the church. Similarly, in 1850 Cape Verdean seaman Emanuel Pease married Madeline Williams, the daughter of John H. Williams, who had come to New Bedford from the "East Indies," and Charlotte Quanwell, an Afro Indian whose family had lived in the New Bedford area since the 1700s.
Madeline Pease and Mary Fortes were among the ninety-five who had left Second Baptist to create Salem Baptist, and both were also founding members of Union Baptist Church in 1895. A Salem Baptist church history noted that the Sunday School's outreach arose from the fact that "there were very few children among the ninety-six members," a circumstance that could have been due to the exodus of young people from the city or negligible immigration or both. After growing healthily before the Civil War, the population of African descent increased only slightly afterward. In the four decades between 1820 and 1860, New Bedford's African American population grew from 203 to 1,518 persons. In the four decades between 1860 and 1900 it grew only from 1,518 to 1,685 people, and the proportion of local population people of African descent occupied declined from 6.8 to 2.6 %.
Stagnation in the population may have motivated, at least in part, the merger of the city's two African American Baptist congregations into Union Baptist Church. Early in 1895 Second Baptist and Salem Baptist jointly formed two committees. The first was an advisory board composed of the pastors of New Bedford's First Baptist and North Churches and representatives of the statewide Baptist convention. The advisory board oversaw the second, a "reconciliation committee" probably composed of members of both churches. In March the reconciliation met to discuss and merger, and on 18 April 1895 the congregations incorporated a new church, Union Baptist. Initially fourteen people from Second Baptist and forty-six from Salem became members, and within months another thirty-nine members of both churches had joined the congregation; church histories list seventy- nine founding members.
While the congregation began to raise funds for a new sanctuary, services were held alternately at Second Baptist's sanctuary on Middle Street and Salem Baptist on North Sixth Street. The last service at Second Baptist Church was on 1 July 1896, the last at Salem on 21 July 1899. Early in 1896 the Union Baptist congregation hired Ephraim H. MacDonald, a minister then serving in Detroit, to serve as its first settled pastor, and MacDonald helped lead the drive to build the new church. In September that year New (continued) 19 Halter, Between Race and Ethnicity, 46-47. 2° Ibid., 7-8. NPS Form 10-900 (Rev. 10-90) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Section number _8 Page6 OMB Approval No.
1024-0018 Union Baptist Church New Bedford (Bristol), MA Bedford's Swedish Baptist Mission bought Second Baptist Church for $3,200. For $1,100 the congregation also sold two houses and lots on nearby Kempton Street that had been left to Salem Baptist Church by Levin and Harriet Johnson Betts, and by August 1899 Union Baptist trustees had sold the Salem Baptist Church sanctuary and lot for about $7,600.?' In addition, between January 1896 and September 1900 hundreds of individuals and some organizations donated $1,450 to the building campaign. With funds from these and other sources, the Union Baptist congregation bought a lot at the corner of Cedar and Court Streets, in the heart of the oldest and largest African American neighborhood in New Bedford.
The cornerstone for the building was laid in 1899, and when construction was complete the congregation held a week-long dedication celebration, from 25 March to 4 April 1900. "Visiting clergyman from far and near" - one of them William Jackson - attended and spoke at the event; Jackson died in New Bedford just six weeks later.? The pulpit furniture in the new church had been Second Baptist's, while the table in the church vestibule had earlier been at Salem Baptist Church. Union Baptist's founding members mirrored in many ways the membership of its two predecessor congregations. Like the group who created Second Baptist Church in 1844, Union Baptist's founders were overwhelmingly born in southern states.
Fifty of the sixty-eight original members whose birthplaces are documented were from the South - thirty one of them from Virginia (including eight each from Richmond and Norfolk), seven from the District of Columbia, six from North Carolina, and six from other southern states. Only nine of these sixty-eight persons were born in Massachusetts and another six were born elsewhere in the North; of those fifteen, six had parents who were born in the South. Three members of the church were from Cape Verde. In addition, the daughter of one African American member had married a Cape Verdean, and two American-born women were the daughters of Cape Verdean men. Several African American members married men of African descent also not born in the United States: Angelina Fortes, the daughter of Mary Bush and Miguel Fortes, married James H. Magnett, born on the South Atlantic island of St.
Helena; Emma Pierce, born in New Bedford, was the second wife of Benjamin C. Magnett of St. Helena; and Rhoda Wainer, descendant of a family that settled in southeastern Massachusetts by the mid-1700s, married the Barbadian Samuel Henry. The mothers of two founding members, Louise Arrick and Madeline Pease, had married Hawaiian-born men. Like Cape Verdean males, these islanders surely came to New Bedford aboard whaling vessels, as all were at different times recruiting and provisioning stations for the industry. (continued) " In his will of 28 January 1862, Levin Betts left houses and lots at 68 and 201 Kempton Street, together valued at two thousand dollars, to his wife Harriet and her son William Henry Johnson; at their deaths the properties were to be left to Salem Baptist Church. Bristol County Register of Probate, 1866. Ephraim H.
McDonald et al., trustees of Union Baptist Church, to F. William Oesting, 9 August 1899, Bristol County Registry of Deeds 205:420. In 1895 Salem Baptist directed James E. Reed, James H. Magnett, and William H. Carney to sell the church's building and land on North Sixth Street for at least $14,000, the proceeds to go into the Union Baptist building fund. Deeds indicate that no offer that high was forthcoming. Oesting was one of three owners of Ashley and Pierce Clothing Company on William Street in New Bedford, For details about the sale of the Betts and Salem Baptist properties see Bristol County Deeds 187:522, 189:61, 199:324, and 199:493. Jackson had served as Salem Baptist Church's pastor from its creation in 1858 until 8 June 1863, when he resigned to become a chaplain at Readville, the camp at which Massachusetts's Union troops trained.
Massachusetts Governor John Albion Andrew appointed Jackson and another New Bedford cleric, William Grimes, in March as alternating post chaplains. When the Fifty-fifth was formed from the surfeit of men who had enlisted in the Fifty-fourth Regiment, the first official African American regiment in the Union Army, Andrew named Jackson chaplain of the Fifty-fifth. Jackson returned to New Bedford on 30 May 1864 and served again as Salem's minister until 1870, when he accepted a ministry in Providence, Rhode Island. How long he served there, and whether he worked in the ministry afterward, is not yet known. See Virginia M. Adams, ed., On the Altar of Freedom: A Black Soldier's Civil War Letters from the Front (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1991), 11 n. 13; Edwin S. Redkey, "Black Chaplains in the Union Army," Civil War History 33, 4 (1987): 332. NPS Form 10-900 (Rev.
10-90) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Section number 8 Page 7 OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Union Baptist Church New Bedford (Bristol), MA In most instances (forty-six of fifty), evidence exists to determine when southern-born members of Union Baptist Church migrated and settled in New Bedford. The majority, or twenty-nine of forty-six, had been in New Bedford since before the Civil War, while seventeen had come to the city afterward. The numbers, though small, suggest the continued appeal of New Bedford as a place to settle. African American migration from the South to the North between 1870 and 1900 did not greatly alter the proportion of southern African Americans to all African Americans: 90.5%of all African Americans lived in the South in 1870, while 89.7% lived there in 1900.
But growth of the African American population over these three decades was profound, climbing from 13,947 in 1870 to 31,974 in 1900 - a rate of growth of nearly 130 % - which, when compared to a 79% increase in African American population in the South, suggests the appeal of Massachusetts as well. More definitively, however, the greater number of pre-Civil War migrants among the southern-born founding members of Union Baptist Church suggests the predominance of what may be called "old families" in Union Baptist Church, African Americans who had been in New Bedford for decades and can be presumed to have assimilated in some measure into northern culture.? Church historian C. Dudley Onley stated that "many of New Bedford's well-known colored families" had attended Salem Baptist Church - Robert and Parthenia Harris Carter, Caledonia Dandridge Thorne, the Pipers, the John D.
Hayden family, the William Ferguson family, John and Senora Lee, and James and Emma Turner. Of the families Onley identified, only the Haydens and possibly Parthenia Carter and Senora Lee had come to New Bedford during or after the Civil War. Other families prominent in the local African American community and, indeed beyond, were founding members of Union Baptist Church. William H. Carney Jr. (1840-1908), who achieved nationwide fame for his bravery during the Fifty-fourth Regiment's assault on Fort Wagner in 1863, was a founder and longtime member, as were his wife Susannah Williams Carney, their daughter Clara, his sister Mary (who married the Cape Verdean mariner Joseph Mindo in 1864), and his wife's stepmother, Love P. Williams. Carney and his parents and siblings were all fugitives, and he was the first person of African descent to win the Congressional Medal of Honor.
For many years the flag that draped Carney's coffin at his funeral in 1908 hung in Union Baptist Church. James E. Reed, born in Winston, North Carolina, in 1864, came to New Bedford with his father's family about 1873, and later married Anna E. Jourdain, whose family had lived in New Bedford since the early 1830s. Reed was among the city's foremost photographers, and also worked for the Commonwealth of Massachusetts on an early and innovative project to make photostatic copies of state records? Reed was the first superintendent of Union Baptist Church's Sunday school, organized in 1895. The great-grandchildren of Union Baptist founding member Miriam Seals were also accomplished.
Elijah Knox, the brother of well-known fugitive Harriet Jacobs, was in New Bedford by 1867 and had taken as his second wife Julia Seals, (continued) 23 The families of Anthony Jourdain and William Bush, related by marriage, had been in New Bedford since the mid-1830s and late 1840s, respectively, but both were related through Jourdain's wife, Hepsabeth Johnson, to Jonathan Cuffe, the brother of renowned mariner Paul Cuffe. The Cuffe family had lived in the region since the mid-1700s. 24 John D. Hayden came to New Bedford in 1863, Parthenia Harris married Robert H. Carter in 1869 in New Bedford, and Senora Lee's parents had moved to the city from West Virginia by 1870. 25 Reed worked as the Massachusetts State House Photostat Operator from 1914, when he had closed his photography business in New Bedford, until 1934.
The Photostat was an early photocopier created about 1911 by two Rochester, New York, companies; it was a large camera that projected and created images on rolls of sensitized paper. The photographic process was ultimately replaced in the 1940s by electrostatic photocopying, or xerography. NPS Form 10-900 (Rev. 10-90) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Section number 8 . Page 8 OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Union Baptist Church New Bedford (Bristol), MA Miriam Seals's daughter. Knox's three grandsons all achieved national prominence. William Jacob Knox Jr. (1904-95) was the first African American to receive a doctorate in chemistry from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, became a researcher on the Manhattan Project, and then secured some twenty-seven patents during his work for Eastman Kodak Company.
Lawrence Howland Knox (born 1906), also a Ph.D. chemist, worked with his brother William on the Manhattan Project. Clinton Everett Knox (1908-80) received a Ph.D. from Harvard and worked for the U.S. Department of State after the Second World War; he later served as ambassador in Paris, Honduras, Benin, and Haiti. In September 1921 the church ceremonially burned its mortgage. The seventy-four-year-old Martha James, formerly a member of the Salem Baptist congregation and then the oldest living member of the Union Baptist congregation, lit the match for the event. Union Baptist continued to attract members who mirrored the composition of the city's population of African descent as a whole - principally descendants of families that had lived in New Bedford since before the Civil War, migrants from the South, and Cape Verdeans.
In 1948 Isaac Gracia, born in Massachusetts to Cape Verdean parents m and ai ied in e aedted sen eil 8 a aideraie, e organist at Union Baptist Church that year was Bertha Youngblood, the granddaughter of Second and Salem Baptist pastor William Jackson. And Union Baptist remained the home of descendants of the Jourdain, Dandridge, Fortes, Carter, and Reed families, all antebellum families. By its centennial in 1995, 170 people, almost all of African descent, were members of Union Baptist Church.? ARCHITECTURAL BACKGROUND Union Baptist Church is one of only two religious building in New Bedford known to have been designed by Nathaniel Cannon Smith (1866-1943), New Bedford's most active and prominent architect of the period. Built in 1899, it precedes the Tiferes Israel Synagogue located at 42 S. Sixth Street, which Smith designed in 1924.
Because of its scale and function, the church is a distinctive example of the Shingle Style in New Bedford, which was enormously popular in the city because of the long tradition of that exterior material stemming back to its origins as an 18"h century whale port. Shingle siding is a common feature of coastal architecture in New England and Long Island, and it became even more pronounced in the 20" century as it became imbued with Colonial Revival sentiments. New Bedford was no exception. Still, it was an unusual material for churches, which were generally masonry construction, and this may reflect the economy employed in the design and building of the Union Baptist Church. The restrained exterior form of the church is not entirely out of scale and character with the 1½- and 2-story wood frame dwellings in the West End.
Its cross-gable roof and domestic-scale entrances and windows are also consistent with its neighborhood context. The 3-story bell tower with pyramidal roof is the most pronounced church feature. However, the church is quite spacious and grand inside. The small sanctuary is distinguished by a truss-work ceiling and art glass windows on the two street walls. An assembly room or fellowship hall is located on the west side of the sanctuary, with the common partition composed of three overhead track doors constructed with wood slats, which allow for the two rooms to be combined for larger occasions. This moveable divider is reminiscent of devices used in Quaker meeting houses. This well-designed but modest church indicates the respectable but continued separate status (continued) 26 "The Churchgoer Visits: Union Baptist Church," New Bedford Standard-Times, 9 May 1996. NPS Form 10-900 (Rev.
10-90) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Section number 8 Page _9 OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Union Baptist Church New Bedford (Bristol), MA people of color had achieved in the New Bedford community, as well as the pride and enthusiasm they had for their re-united church and their West End community. In its current setting, Union Baptist Church is an institutional survivor of the urban renewal of the West End, which gutted the center of this neighborhood, and is a tangible reminder of the close-knit nature of the West End. Nathaniel Cannon Smith was born in New Bedford on January 18, 1866, the son of William T. and Caroline A. Brownell) Smith. William T.Smith wasa merchant and a member of the New Bedford Common Council.
After graduating from the local high school in 1885, Nathaniel studied wood engraving with E.G. Dobbins. He had decided on a career in architecture by the time he entered the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris, where he apprenticed with Henri Duray. Upon returning to New Bedford, Smith entered into an active practice designing civic and domestic buildings. His local commissions include the George Emerson Building, the New Bedford Textile School, the Slocum Building, and the Times and Olympia buildings, the Clarence A. Cook School. Smith was also the architect for the expansion and conversion of the old Town Hall into the New Bedford Free Public Library. He also designed scores of houses in the city, many in the Shingle Style, which celebrated New Bedford's Colonial past and its sustained preference for wood shingle siding. In 1897 Smith married Alice M.
Adams, and he taught architectural design at the Swain School of Design in New Bedford.2 (end) 27 This information was distilled from an inventory form researched and written by Peggy Madeiros for the New Bedford Office of Historic Preservation in 1981. The property was a large Shingle Style house Nathaniel C. Smith designed for Jennie Gibbs Grinnell in 1904 and located at 32 Maple Street. (See Form #45-322.) NPS Form 10-900-a (8-86) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Section number 9 Page 1 OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Union Baptist Church New Bedford (Bristol), MA Bibliography Boss, Judith A., and Joseph D. Thomas. New Bedford: A Pictorial History. Norfolk VA: Donning Co., 1983. Brooks, Walter H. "Evolution of the Negro Baptist Church," Journal of Negro History 7:1 (1922).
"The Churchgoer Visits: Union Baptist Church," New Bedford Standard-Times, 9 May 1996. Clayton, Barbara, and Kathleen Whitley. Guide to New Bedford. Chester CT: Pequot Press, 1987. Ellis, Leonard Bolles. History of New Bedford and its Vicinity, 1602-1892. Syracuse NY: D. Mason & Co., 1892. Grover, Kathryn. The Fugitive's Gibraltar: Escaping Slaves and Abolitionism in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Amherst MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2001. Halter, Marilyn. Between Race and Ethnicity: Cape Verdean American Immigrants, 1860-1965. Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993. "History of the Churches of New Bedford: Second Baptist (Colored)," New Bedford Standard, 5 October 1854. "Installation of Pastor Today Marks New Milestone in Union Baptist Church History," New Bedford Standard-Times, 15 June 1952.
Twenty-Fifth Anniversary of the Salem Baptist Church, New Bedford, Mass., 1858-1883. New Bedford MA: Sherman & Purrington, 1885. (end) Union Baptist Church Name of Property Bristol, MA County, State 10. Geographical Data Acreage of Property less than one acre UTM References See continuation sheet. (Place additional UTM references on a continuation sheet) 1.19 338800 4610760 Zone Easting Northing "Zone Easting Northing 3. Zone Easting "Zone Easting _ See continuation sheet Verbal Boundary Description (Describe the boundaries of the property on a continuation sheet.) Boundary Justification (Explain why the boundaries were selected on a continuation sheet.) 11. Form Prepared By name/title_Neil Larson, Kathryn Grover, consultants, with Betsy Friedberg, NR Director, MHC organization. Massachusetts Historical Commission date .
_May 2008 street & number 220 Morrissey Boulevard telephone- 617-727-8470 city or town_ Boston stateMA _ zip code_02125 Additional Documentation Submit the following items with the completed form: Continuation Sheets Northing Northing A USGS map (7.5 or 15 minute series) indicating the property's location. A sketch map for historic districts and properties having large acreage or numerous resources. Photographs Representative black and white photographs of the property. Additional items (Check with the SHPO or FPO for any additional items) Property Owner (Complete this item at the request of the SHPO or FPO.) name Union Baptist Church street & number 109 Court Street .telephone 508-992-8844 city or town New Bedford _ state.
MA _ zip code 02740 Paperwork Reduction Act Statement: This information is being collected for applications to the National Register of Historic Places to nominate properties for listing or determine eligibility for listing, to list properties, and to amend existing listings. Response to this request is required to obtain a benefit in accordance with the National Historic Preservation Act, as amended (16 U.S.C. 470 et seq.). Estimated Burden Statement: Public reporting burden for this form is estimated to average 18.1 hours per response including the time for reviewing instructions, gathering and maintaining data, and completing and reviewing the form. Direct comments regarding this burden estimate or any aspect of this form to the Chief, Administrative Services Division, National Park Service, P.O.
Box 37127, Washington, DC 20013-7127: and the Office of Management and Budget, Paperwork Reductions Project (1024-0018), Washington, DC 20503. NPS Form 10-900 (Rev. 10-90) United States Department of the Interior National Park Service National Register of Historic Places Continuation Sheet Section number 10 Page1 OMB Approval No. 1024-0018 Union Baptist Church New Bedford (Bristol), MA Verbal Boundary Description The nominated property is located on a corner lot bounded by Court Street on the south and Cedar Streer on the east. House lots abut the property on its north and west sides. See attached assessor's map for a more detailed description. Boundary Justification The boundary represents the historic dimensions of the property. (end) PHOTOGRAPHS Photographer: Neil Larson 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.
View of exterior from SE View of exterior from NE Sanctuary interior from SE Sanctuary interior from NW, detail of ceiling truss work Meeting room interior from SE UNITED STATES DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR NATIONAL PARK SERVICE NATIONAL REGISTER OF HISTORIC PLACES EVALUATION/RETURN SHEET REQUESTED ACTION: NOMINATION PROPERTY Union Baptist Church NAME : MULTIPLE NAME : STATE & COUNTY: MASSACHUSETTS, Bristol DATE RECEIVED: DATE OF 16TH DAY: DATE OF WEEKLY LIST: 5/07/08 6/07/08 DATE OF PENDING LIST: 5/23/08 DATE OF 45TH DAY: 6/20/08 REFERENCE NUMBER: 08000532 REASONS FOR REVIEW: ADZUDR1BU APPEAL: N DATA PROBLEM: N LANDSCAPE: N LESS THAN 50 YEARS: OTHER: N PDIL: N PERIOD: N PROGRAM UNAPPROVED: REQUEST: N SAMPLE: N SLR DRAFT: N NATIONAL: N N N COMMENT WAIVER: N /ACCEPT RETURN REJECT 6 Me /2008 DATE ABSTRACT/ SUMMARY COMMENTS: Historically and architecunally siqnificant late 1ath century Shimgle-style church associated wich New Bedfrd's African-American community.
RECOM. / CRETERIA Accept Ajc REVIEWER Tatuike Andus DISCIPLINE Histarian TELEPHONE DATE 6/16/2008 DOCUMENTATION see attached comments Y/N see attached SLR Y/N If a nomination is returned to the nominating authority, the nomination is no longer under consideration by the NPS. MA-(BRISPOLCOUNMY)-UNION2.A Uncon Baptist Church New Bedfnd, Bristol Co., MA Image 2: Viewo extanir fr MA-(BRISTULCOUNMY) -UNIONI.ff Uncon Bapptist Church New Bedford, Bristl Co., MA Imagal: Vicio ol exterion from MA-(BRISTOLCOUNMY)- UNION3 Uncon Baptist Church New Bedford, Bristl Co.
MA Image 3: Viewos of sauctuara In Uncon Baptist Church New Bedfard, Bristol Go., M Image 4: Viewo) sauctuar fre detail of truss wark i MA-(BRISTOLCOUNTY)-UNIONS., Unvou Baptist Church Naw Bedford, Bristol Co., MA Image 5: View of interior meetin CT BTIT CREACIAN -LIBERTATO The Commonwealth of Massachusetts William Francis Galvin, Secretary of the Commonwealth Massachusetts Historical Commission May 6, 2008 Mr. J. Paul Loether National Register of Historic Places Department of the Interior National Park Service 1201 Eye Street, NW,8" floor Washington, DC 20005 Dear Mr. Loether: Enclosed please find the following nomination form: Union Baptist Church, 109 Court St., New Bedford (Bristol), MA The nomination has been voted eligible by the State Review Board and has been signed by the State Historic Preservation Officer.
The owners of the property in the Certified Local Government community of New Bedford were notified of pending State Review Board consideration 60 to 90 days before the meeting and were afforded the opportunity to comment. Sincerely, Betry Fuedieng Betsy Friedberg National Register Director Massachusetts Historical Commission enclosure cc: Joan Beaulian, New Bedford Historical Commission Union Baptist Church Neil Larson, Kathryn Grover, consultants George N.Smith, New Bedford Planning Board Anne Louro, Preservation Planner Mayor Scott W. Lang, City of New Bedford 220 Morrissey Boulevard, Boston, Massachusetts 02125 (617) 727-8470 - Fax: (617) 727-5128 www.state.ma.us/sec/mhc
Block