USA > North Carolina > Historical papers of the North Carolina Conference Historical Society and the Western North Carolina Conference Historical Society > Part 16
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During these ten years the assessment for Domestic Missions was increased several times. In 1900 the assessment was $9,200. The next year it was increased to $11,000, and later to $11,500. In 1910 it was increased to $14,500. It was not merely as the assess- ment was increased, however, that the collections increased. There was throughout this period a growing feeling of responsibility on the part of Presiding Elders, Pastors and people in regard to the paying of the assessment that was made. In 1900 the Conference was pay- ing about eighty per cent of the assessment, and that was probably as large a per cent as the Conference had ever paid. In 1905 the
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assessment was paid in full for the first time, and this record was maintained for several years.
The money raised by the two Conferences in the state in recent years has been supplemented by certain special gifts which should be noted. In 1906 Mr. Washington Duke in his will left to each conference $5,000 for Domestic Missions. The amount received by the North Carolina Conference has been yielding three hundred dollars annually in interest and this has been used in the regular appropriations to mission charges.
In 1914 Mr. J. B. Duke, a son of Mr. Washington Duke, made a donation of $35,000 to the two Conferences and of this amount ten thousand was to be used in rural mission work. A like amount has been given each year since then. These gifts have made it possible for the Conference Boards to strengthen greatly the work under their care.
Included in the history of Methodist Missions in the state should be an account of the work done by the Board of Church Extension, but to give this branch of our mission work such notice as it deserves would make this paper too long. Organized in 1882, it has contributed to the building of churches in this Conference $72,121.30; to the building of parsonages, $7,892.00; total, $80,013.30. It has also raised a Loan Fund of $3,550.00. These funds have been of great value to our mission work, especially in helping to provide a perma- nent home for the Church in new territory.
The work of the women of the Church along home mission lines must not be allowed to pass unnoticed. The General Conference of 1886 authorized the organization of a Woman's Department of the Board of Church Extension, and our Conference Board of Church Extension at its next meeting established such an organization for this conference by the appointment of a Secretary and a Treasurer and thirteen District Secretaries. The organization at first had as its object the raising of funds for parsonage building, but in 1890 the General Conference enlarged its powers so as to allow it to do any work coming under the head of Home Missions, and at the same time gave it the name, "Woman's Parsonage and Home Mission Society." In 1898 the name was again changed and the organization came to be known as "The Woman's Home Mission Society." though it still had as a part of its work the building of parsonages. The society has in recent years been consolidated with the Woman's
Foreign Missionary Society, and is now doing its work as a depart- ment of the Woman's Missionary Society. In the North Carolina Conference the Society has not found so much missionary work to do as it has beyond our borders, but in giving direction to the local activities of the Church along missionary lines it has been an organi- zation of great value.
Green Hill, Preacher, Patriot, Pioneer
REV. THOMAS N. IVEY*
T can be safely stated that there are comparatively few who can locate chronologically the subject of this paper or mention any fact that would naturally project him as a distant historical character. He figures only modestly in the annals of his State and Church. No standard history gives him more than a passing mention. Then why introduce him to a Historical Society as the legitimate subject of an historical paper? Simply because he was a maker of history. Every history-maker is a ward, if not a child of history, possessing a valid claim to that publicity which represents more a method of ethical torch-bearing than of sensational advertising.
There should be a clear conception of what is meant by history. Mr. Emerson in his elaborate essay on "History" is entitled to attention when he says: "Broader and deeper we must write our annals-from an ethical reformation, from an influence of the ever new, ever sanative conscience-if we would trulier express our cen- tral, wide relative nature instead of this old chronology of selfishness and pride to which we have too long lent our ears." The essence of the meaning of these words of Mr. Emerson is, that apart from history of the old chronology and the pride of spectacular events and of haloed personalities, there is a truer, juster, higher history of ethical refor- mations springing from impulses born amid individual strivings, and of mighty, if not advertised, exploits inspired by that "sanative con- science," which ignores mere chronologies and despises the chaplet- leaf of fame.
To this latter kind of history belongs the subject of this paper. We cannot study his life with its high idealism, its keen pioneering energies, and its sound constructive service to church and country without realizing that he justifies his claim to the attention of the higher history and answers signally to that definition of a "great man" given by Mr. Emerson in another essay: "I count him great who inhabits a higher sphere of thought into which other men rise with difficulty and labor." Because of the chronic and seemingly incurable misconception of the meaning of real history and of real greatness we find in Green Hill one of history's almost "forgotten men." The mission of this paper is to bring him out, if possible, into the light of a broader recognition and a more appreciative memory, for to remember truly such a man is to keep flowing a fountain which
* An address before the Historical Society of the Western North Carolina Conference, October 19, 1920, and before that of the North Carolina Conference. November 15. 1921. The author and speaker. being a member of the North Carolina Conference and successively Editor of the Raleigh Christian Advocate and the Nashville Christian. Advocate, died in the year 1923.
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for more than a century has been pouring its waters into the mighty current of our national life.
Green Hill, the son of Green and Grace Bennett Hill, was born in Bute County, North Carolina, November 3, 1741. There are no records which throw any light on his immediate forbears. It is highly presumable that they moved to North Carolina in the latter part of the 17th century with that band of English settlers who located around Albemarle Sound and later on the banks of the Roanoke. That the Hills in that early day were members of the Established Church may be taken for granted. There is an old entry to the effect that Green Hill, undoubtedly the father of our subject, was appointed vestryman of the Parish of St. George in 1758.
It is to be regretted that we know so little of the boyhood and youth of Green Hill. It must be apparent to all that there is a decided disadvantage for one who essays to draw the picture and appraise the life of a man who is not seen in the morning light of boyhood and youth. That morning light is needed to harmonize per- spectives, equalize values, and explain many things that appear so plain at noonday or in the mellow light of evening. Imagination, how- ever, using the knowledge of conditions that obtained in the Carolina Province in 1741 can make the best of it. In those days every invit- ing avenue, it seems now, was closed to the boy. The country was a tangled wilderness. The settlers were widely scattered. There was not a regular school house in the whole colony. There was no post office. There was no newspaper. There were only a few churches scattered over a vast territory. The Sunday School had not been established. Steam and electricity were unknown. There was not a public road. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that boyhood in that day was only a stretch of strenuous, cheerless existence, and that Green Hill as a boy did not find all that was necessary to fill to the brim the cup of eager, bounding, inquisitive life.
During these early days two epochal movement whose respective culminations were destined to change the history of America, but of the whole world, were rapidly gathering force. They had been born long years before Green Hill was born. They were to envelop him and either make him, or leave him a mere human fragment in their wake. One of these movements was toward civil freedom. The other was toward that broad ecclesiastical freedom which denotes the highest spiritual liberty for the individual and the state. The one culminated in the American Republic; the other in American Episcopal Metho- dism.
Both movements, as has been stated, enveloped Green Hill at a critical time in the life of the movements and in the life of the man himself. We see the credentials of his eminent forcefulness in his active relationship to these movements. He rose to the full heights of the situation. He showed a loyalty so true, a devotion so exalted, and a service so self-sacrificing and constructive as to make it impos- sible for us now to dig beneath our Republic and our Methodism without finding him among the foundation stones of the imposing superstructures. In studying his claims to remembrance on the part
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of the nation and of Methodism we must view him in his relation to these movements and to another movement to be considered later on in this paper.
The resistless urge toward the goal representing the establish- ment of Episcopal Methodism in America really began that evening in Aldersgate street in 1738 when John Wesley felt his heart "strangely warmed" and at last rejoiced in the long-sought consciousness of spiritual freedom. That "strange warmth" and the thrill of a new found liberty in Christ Jesus established the Methodist Societies in England in 1740. It has much to do with the repeated visits to America of George Whitefield who went as a flame of evangelical fire up and down the Atlantic seaboard. It sent Philip Embury to New York in 1760. In the heart of Robert Strawbridge it operated to build the first Methodist Church in America in 1766. It built St John Church in New York in 1768. It brought Francis Asbury across the sea in 1771. It sent Robert Williams to Virginia in 1772.
The religious condition in North Carolina when it was first touched by the breath of Methodism was not encouraging. There were few churches. There were not more than a mere dozen established churches and chapels in the whole province. Only clergymen of the Established Church were allowed to perform the rites of matrimony. The Baptists were preaching at several points. There were fewer than twenty congregations of Presbyterians. Several Lutheran and German Reformed churches were being established in the western part of the colony. The Moravians had settled what is now known as Forsyth County in 1753. The Quakers had been preaching in the province for nearly a hundred years. To obtain a clear idea of the spiritual destitution of the province in the latter decade of the eighteenth century we have only to read the diaries of Francis Asbury and others. Some of the entries appear amusing to us, but at that time the facts were far from amusing. The condition was so alarm- ing during the administration of Governor Gabriel Johnston that he deemed it necessary to read to the House a special message on the subject.
Green Hill was more than thirty years old when he found himself caught in the swirl of the invincible Methodist movement. We do not know exactly when it was. It may have been when Joseph Pil- moor, the first Methodist preacher to set foot on North Carolina soil, came down from Virginia and set the whole section blazing with revival fire. Or it may have been a little later under the preaching of Robert Williams, who organized the first Methodist Society in North Carolina. It was most probably during that wonderful revival which started under the preaching of Robert Williams in Virginia in 1772 and swept across the border into Bute County in which Green Hill lived. But one day he felt the Methodist tide washing around his feet as he listened to preaching which caused him to make the great renunciation and the great surrender. He was not content to bask in the new liberty into which the Holy Spirit had brought him. He entered the new life as a leader. Shortly after his conversion he began as a local preacher to establish the new faith in his community.
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It was through the preaching of Pilmoor and Williams and of such local preachers as Green Hill and others that the North Carolina Circuit to which Poythress, Dromgoole and Tatum were appointed in '1775, had 683 members. He had helped to lay the mudsills of Episcopal Methodism and was striving with all his soul to build his very life into the structure. He was the first native son of North Carolina, so far as I know, to become a Methodist preacher.
Let us now leave Green Hill as a leader in that movement which was later to culminate in the establishment of American Episcopal Methodism and see him as a leader in that other movement which culminated in the establishment of the American Republic.
The history of the American colonies is the history of conflict not so much with Indians, the wilderness, and the rigors of the soil and climate, as that waged by the spirit of freedom which forced Magna Charta from King John on June 15, 1715, and then set out to show everywhere and at all times a mailed hand against tyranny. The story of North Carolina, therefore, is a story of the victories and defeats of this spirit of liberty. It was very active during the Proprietary Period, 1663 to 1729. It was manifest in active opposition to the payment of export duties, the exactions of the Established Church, and other forms of royal tyrannies exercised hrough mercenary proprietors. There was a bloody clash during the administration of Governor Tryon in 1768 on the field of Alamance. The iniquity of the Stamp Act was firing the animosities of the people. The conflict assumed a very serious form in 1774 during the administration of Governor Martin when, on August 25, in spite of the opposition of the governor, the first pro- vincial Assembly met at New Bern to elect delegates to a Continental Congress at Philadelphia, which congress assumed to exercise powers vested in the people, and to acknowledge no duty whatever to the Crown.
The first Provincial Assembl- in North Carolina was made up of delegates elected by the people. According to Wheeler in his History of North Carolina, "it was not a conflict of arms or force, but it was the first act of that great drama in which battles and blood formed only subordinate parts. It was the first Assembly of the people -of North Carolina in a representative character in opposition to the Royal King." It is not strange to find as a delegate to this great meeting our local Methodist preacher, Green Hill. He and William Person were delegates from Bute County which will ever be known in North Carolina as the county in which there were "no tories." It would have been as difficult for Green Hill to refrain from participating in this conflict as from becoming a local preacher of Methodism after the great light had broken into his soul. That constructive element in his nature, with a strong ethical impulse, made him a forceful leader in the ranks of those who established the American Republic and in the ranks of the white bannered host that established American Methodism.
The Second Provincial Congress met at New Bern on April 3,
.
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1775. It was called by the moderator of the First Provincial Congress. The House of Assembly which had been elected by order of Governor Martin met at the same time and place. The members of one body were the members of the other. There is no record of Green Hill's having been a member of this Second Provincial Congress, though he probably was. The Third Provincial Congress met at Hillsboro on the 20th of August, the same year. At this Congress momentous action was taken, severing relationship with the Crown. A kind of provisional government was established, an army was placed in the field, and provision was made for the issue of necessary currency. Green Hill was a member of this Third Provincial Congress. He was appointed to serve on one of the most important committees-that of Privileges and Elections. It is an interesting fact to be remembered that both members from Bute County were ministers of the Gospel, Green Hill of the Methodist Societies and Rev. William Hill of the Baptist Church. There was in this body another minister, Rev. Henry Patillo, of the Presbyterian Church.
Green Hill was a member of the Fourth Provincial Congress, which met in April, 1776, at Halifax. The crowning work of this Congress was to affirm the province's absolute independence of the mother country. Thus North Carolina led all the colonies in affirm- ing this independence. At this Congress Green Hill received a military title-that of 2nd Major of the militia. He was known later in life as "Colonel Hill," but if he received any other title than that of Major I have not been able to find the record. He was placed on a committee to regulate the militia. Cornelius Harnett, Samuel Ashe and William Hooper were his fellow committeemen. He was also designated as one of the signers of the bills of credit issued by the Congress. The highest testimony to his influence and ability was his appointment on a committee to prepare a civil constitution. The committee failed to agree on a constitution, but appointed a sub-com- mittee to propose a temporary form of government pending the next Session of the Assembly. The Council of Safety was appointed and the Council recommended that on the 15th of the following October delegates should be elected to meet on November 12, to form a consti- tution. This latter assembly had Richard Caswell for its president. On December 17th, a day ever to be remembered in North Carolina, a bill of rights was adopted. On December 18th, a constitution was adopted, with Caswell as Governor, and North Carolina became entirely independent of the British Government.
Green Hill was not a delegate to this famous Assembly, though no man in the state had done more to make it possible. We find him, however, an active member of the Assembly of 1777. He represented Franklin County in the Assembly of 1779. Bute County was no more. From it had been formed Franklin and Warren Counties. In this Assembly of 1779 he presented a bill for making a better provision for the poor and so far as records show, he was pioneer in the movement to establish public institutions for the care of the indigent in the Old North State.
In 1781 Green Hill enlisted as chaplain of the 10th Regiment,
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Sharp's Campany, and saw service the same year as far west as Salisbury, when our armies were on a retreat.
On November 30, 1782, the treaty of Paris was signed and American independence was a fact forever more. It would seem that the time had come for Green Hill to retire to his large landed estate on the Tar near Louisburg, the county seat of Franklin, and leave others to assume the burden of public duties. He had taken a strenuous and prominent part in establishing the independence of his state and the country. But the idea of retirement had not entered his mind. It was unsuited to his temperament. He was only a little over forty years old. He was too useful a man to cease his functions as a burden bearer.
In 1783 he was elected Treasurer for the District of Halifax. There were several districts and as many treasurers. All state offi- cials were under the Governor. He was also elected one of the Councellors of State, which position he continued to hold until some time in 1786, as shown in a letter written him by Governor Caswell. There is no doubt that as Treasurer of Halifax County he had some trouble with the Assembly. A shortage was charged. We are not surprised, though, to find that in the Assembly of 1789 the committee appointed to report on the shortage of Green Hill as Treasurer of Halifax District reported favorably, and that he was entitled to 233 pounds, 13 shillings, and sixpence, which amount was directed to be paid to Mr. Hill. This was a double vindication. In his case there had been no shortage, but a reimbursement was declared necessary.
At the beginning of 1785 there were fewer than 18,000 Metho- dists in America. There were hardly one hundred preachers. Coke had been sent by John Wesley across the Atlantic. The famous Christmas Conference of 1784 had been held. and Episcopal Metho- dism, altogether independent of the Established Church, had become an organized force. The time had come for the holding of the first Annual Conference of organized Episcopal Methodism. The place had been selected. There was no directory showing the homes of the preachers. There was no need of any directory. There was only one home for all the preachers, and that was the home of Green Hill. It was one of those plain storey-and-a-half houses so common in that day. Yet then it was considered a mansion. It was built of massive timbers, having five rooms in the basement, four on the second floor and two in the attic. It still stands in a remarkable state of pres- ervation. Through one door you look southward. Through the opposite door you see across the Tar about one mile distant the beautiful town of Louisburg. Close at hand is an old fashioned garden. On the right is a clump of cedars guarding the resting place of the dead, among whom is Edwin Fuller, North Carolinas gifted poet, and a descendant of the owner of the house.
The upper storey of the house now contains two rooms. Origin- ally there was but one room. In this one upper room the first Annual Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church in America was held
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on April 20, 1785. Bishops Asbury and Coke presided. This Annual Conference embraced a territory covering Virginia, North Carolina and South Carolina. Twenty preachers were present. There was John King, the Oxford scholar and skilled physician, who was disinherited by his parents when he became a local preacher, and who crossed the ocean and preached the first Methodist sermon in Baltimore. There was Jesse Lee, one of the doughtiest knights that ever went forth in the crusade of Methodism. There was Philip Bruce, the boldest of the "Thundering Legion." There was Reuben Ellis, one of the choicest spirits among the first Carolina preachers. It is very probable that the following also were present: Edward Dromgoole, Francis Poythress, John Easter, John Dickins, John Tunnell, Hope Hull, and James O'Kelly.
It was a fraternal meeting. There were no vexing questions. Only the normal work of the new Church was considered. Bishop Coke most unwisely injected the slavery question. The injection was unwise not primarily because he was the guest of a man who had many slaves, but because the question was in extreme form for that day and those circumstances. Fortunately he did not push his radical views. The gain during the year was gratifying. There had been 991 members received. The work was extended into Georgia. Philip Bruce was made a presiding elder. For the first time the term and the office came into use.
While in the house of Green Hill were held three other Annual Conferences-in January, 1790, December, 1792, and December, 1794 -- it is probable that in each case the members of the respective conferences were entertained in the neighborhood. By this time the population of the community had grown. Bishop Asbury in his Journal says, under date of January 19, 1792, "I rode with no small difficulty to Green Hill's, about two hundred miles, the roads being covered with snow and ice. Our Conference began and ended in great peace and harmony. We had thirty-one preachers stationed at the different houses in the neighborhood."
It can thus be seen what a gracious host this great Methodist was. His hospitality, as will be seen, was extended to a Methodist Conference in another state. We must be careful to make the chief fact in Green Hill's life not that he entertained so graciously the first Annual Conference of Episcopal Methodism in America, but that he acted so self-sacrificingly and heroically in making the Methodism whose first Conference he entertained.
Green Hill was destined to take active part in another great movement which played a most important part in the development of this country. This was the pioneer movement, which, toward the latter part of the eighteenth century, crossed the Alleghanies and helped to build up the great State of Tennessee and other states of the Mississippi Valley. The frontier has ever been the goal of civilization's advancing columns. Emerson Hough has said: "Always it has been the frontier which has allured many of our boldest souls. And always just back of the frontier, advancing, receding, crossing
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