Location: Rock Creek Dairy Road southeast of Sedalia
County: Guilford
Original Date Cast: 2003
Madison Lindsay was born into slavery in 1833 in the community of Dennysville in Guilford County. He reportedly fled to Canada and later moved to Massachusetts. Lindsey attended Oberlin College, a school in Ohio with Congregational Church ties, from 1862 to 1866 and returned to Guilford County in 1870. At that time Lindsay purchased five acres from John Foust and established a church which he served as minister. Lindsay also opened a school for blacks at that location around the same time. It is the tradition among church members that Lindsay worked as a valet for Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and that Longfellow was Lindsay’s benefactor for college training as well as the church venture. However, according to an article in the Greensboro News and Record based on a check with the curators of the Longfellow National Historic Site, there are no records of Madison Lindsay in Longfellow’s correspondence.
Congregational churches for blacks are rare in the South. The church’s strict rules for conduct and rejection of African American folk customs tended to deter Southern blacks from affiliating. Wadsworth Church also was unusual in that it was a black man who established it rather than a Northern white missionary. Lindsay’s connection with the church likely began at Oberlin which was founded by Congregationalists. The 1885 Wadsworth Church building still stands on the property. In 1886 philanthropist James J. H. Gregory of Massachusetts presented the church with a bell. Gregory was also the principal benefactor of Gregory Institute in Wilmington. Reverend Lindsay died in 1905. The church remained a focal point for the black community in then rural Guilford County.
The church was designated a local historical landmark by the Guilford County Board of Commissioners in 2000. In 2002 the property was added to the National Register of Historic Places primarily for its architectural significance as a little-altered rural 19th century African American church. The present congregation, of less than one hundred members, meets nearby in a newer brick chapel.
References:
William E. Montgomery, Under Their Own Vine and Fig Tree: The African-American Church in the South, 1865-1900 (1993)
Guilford County Deed Books
Jim Schlosser, “Ex-slave’s Church a National Site,” Greensboro News and Record, n.d. (2003)
National Register of Historic Places nomination (2002)