Baptist roots: Maine, Ohio, Indiana

According to one nineteenth-century history of Fountain County, Indiana, Alexander White was an ordained deacon in the Mount Carmel Baptist Church in Fountain County, Indiana. My family preserves a tradition that his son, David W. White (d. 1879), and his son, Erasmus P. White (d. 1915), were Baptist deacons. My grandfather, Ray White (d. 1977), continued the tradition.

The Mount Carmel church was closely connected to the White family, so much so that it is also known to this day as White's Chapel. Although Alexander and Hannah White did not found the church by themselves, they were among the founders. The church is located adjacent to Alexander and Hannah's farm, and the same history I mentioned above states that Alexander gave land for a cemetery (which appears under the name White's Chapel Cemetery in FindaGrave). In his 1884 will, Alexander left money for the fencing of the family graves.

Why were they Baptists? So far I have found nothing associating David White, Sr. with any church in Clermont County, Ohio. His son, daughter-in-law, and other family members are buried in the cemetery of the Mt. Pisgah church (now United Methodist). Methodism has a long history in Clermont County, going back at least as far as 1805.

However, Hannah White's family were Baptist. She is recorded in the minutes of what is now the Amelia Baptist Church as receiving a letter of transfer from what was then the Second Ten-Mile Baptist Church. It has been claimed (but without substantiation) that her grandfather, the Revolutionary War veteran John Wheeler (d. 1844) was a Baptist lay preacher. The history of Baptists in Bowdoinham, Maine (where Hannah was born, and to which her grandfather had moved with his family in 1762) goes back to the foundation of Bowdoinham itself. My guess is that the Baptist heritage entered the family through Hannah.

The Mount Carmel church belonged to the Tippecanoe Association, a so-called "Missionary Baptist" association. My family's tradition was that in Indiana we were "Hardshell" or Primitive (i.e., Calvinist) Baptists. But unless there were other family members who were Primitive Baptists, this particular tradition seems to be incorrect. The Franklin College Archives contains minutes of annual meetings of the Tippecanoe Association in the nineteenth century. Alexander White appears as early as 1846 as a messenger to the annual meeting. In the 1880s his son Albert H. appears as the clerk of the church and head of the Sunday school, and his son George R. appears as a messenger from 1882 to 1885.

The natural place for baptisms would have been the Wabash River, which flows about a mile west of the Mount Carmel church. The liturgical scholar in me would like to know what their baptisms were like: how they processed to the river, what they wore, what they sang, what they preached, what they ate together afterwards.