The South.
HISTORY OF A CHURCH IN ALABAMA.
BY REV. SPENCER SNELL.
The beautiful and healthful city of Talladega is located among the Appalachian foot hills. The First Congregational church was organized in the year 1868. The first members were people who came out of the colored Baptist Church, and who had begun to look for a more intelligent mode of worship and better religious instruction than it was possible to have in churches whose pastors had been slaves and were uneducated.
The first pastor of the church was Rev. H. E. Brown, of Ridgefield, O., whom the American Missionary Association had sent into the South. Since his retirement the pulpit has been occupied by several pastors, including the acceptable services of professors of Talladega College. My pastorate began in 1894.
There are friendly relations between our church and the other colored churches near at hand. The pastor is often invited to preach in the other churches. The pastors of two of the Baptist churches are graduates of our school here, and the pastor of one of the Methodist churches is now taking lessons in our seminary.
The present membership of the church is 219. Many of them are poor students who have to be helped through school. The resident[pg 185] members have but very little money. With one or two exceptions they receive small pay for what they do. Those who have trades find but little here to do and have to go away to get employment. Among the male members of the church are farmers, mechanics, etc., and among the females those who do laundry work, sewing, etc. Several of these women take the washing of families home and work very hard for a very little money with which to subsist their families, buy books, and pay tuition for their children in Talladega College.
There are about thirty-five members of the church who own their homes, and about eleven who rent the places where they live. Several of the homes owned by the members of the church are fairly comfortable for Southern homes, having from two to seven rooms. None of them are costly. I do not suppose that one of them cost $1,000. Neither is the furniture in them costly. Scarcely any of them have carpets on their floors. They look upon carpets as a luxury which they cannot afford. Plaster on the walls is almost as rare as carpets on the floors. In some cases there is not a rocking-chair in the house. The furniture they have is of a very ordinary kind.
The people have but very little money and are obliged to struggle long and hard to get a little place to call home, in many cases buying the lumber and hiring the carpenter on credit. This being the case, it takes them years and years to pay for the little homes. The homes vary from the fairly comfortable to the wretched. It is noticeable that those who have had the advantages of an education have better homes than those who have no education.