Antebellum Church Trivia

A few weeks ago on my way home from Philadelphia I stopped by one of my new favorite towns to visit.   I was astonished to read on a plaque outside the Episocpal Church pictured at right that a famous abolitionist was married there in 1836.  Astonished because I associated this man so much with the cause of abolition that I had never thought that he would have married a southerner, I guess.  Or that he would ever have been welcome in a town in the slave-owning south.  But I think this is further testimony to how much things changed in and after the 1830s.  Just as Cornelius Sinclair's freedom suit testifies to a less zealously proslavery world in the 1820s, so does this man's marriage in the 1830s  in a county seat in North Carolina.  So much for hints here.  Where's this Church and who was the abolitionist who married here in 1836?

That isn't the best picture in the world -- the sun was in the wrong place (or phrased a little differently -- I was there at the wrong time of day).    Here's a slightly different view of the church.

Comments

[Bill Turnier]

With the 2 highway route signs showing in the second picture, I thought I could find it and gave it the old college try. No can do! I leave it to others with better computer search skills to come up with the answer.

[Owen]

I believe it's the Emmanuel Church in Warrenton, NC. Horace Greeley married Mary Youngs Cheney here in 1836.

[Alfred L. Brophy]

Owen is, as always, correct. (Timothy Williams of the University of Oregon also tweeted this. Look for Tim's book this fall on the antebellum University of North Carolina; I'll have a lot to say about this when it appears.)

I was really astonished by this, because Greeley is -- by the time of the 1850s -- one of the most hated of the abolitionists. I'm thinking it wouldn't have been safe for him to travel to (even moderate) North Carolina then. But two decades earlier, things were different (one of which was that he hadn't made a name for himself as an abolitionist zealot). I took a bunch of pictures when I was in Warrenton, which unfortunately didn't come out all that well. Really sad that my pictures of William Eaton's house aren't better, because I write about William Eaton and I was thinking that would make a great trivia question.

I did, however, get a picture of the segregated World War I and World War II monument. Just trying to figure out how I'm going to use that at Savannah Law School's progressive property conference when Steve Clowney and I talk about public monuments and race....