When the Presbytery of Philadelphia was established in 1706—the first Presbyterian body that would eventually become what we know today as the PCUSA—there were no Presbyterian congregations in North Carolina at all. The entire population of North Carolina at that time was only about 10,000 people. The colony was very small and largely uninhabited.

By the time First Presbyterian Church of Raleigh was established in 1816, North Carolina’s population had grown to half a million people, and there were 100 Presbyterian churches throughout the state. How did we go from no churches in the early 1700s to 100 churches by the early 19th century? That’s the story we’re going to explore today.

Early Colonial Settlement

You might recall that the first attempt at English settlement in North Carolina was Sir Walter Raleigh’s settlement on Roanoke Island in the late 1500s, which eventually became known as the Lost Colony when the colonists seemingly disappeared. Through the 1600s, not much happened in North Carolina for several reasons, chief among them being that the North Carolina coast was not particularly conducive to ships arriving. The coast really liked to eat ships, particularly around the Outer Banks, so Spanish settlers and others largely avoided the area.

By the mid-1600s, some settlers began coming down from Virginia into northeastern North Carolina, around what is now the Edenton area. There is a record that Francis Makemie—often called the father of American Presbyterianism—visited North Carolina in 1683 and 1684 and preached there, though we don’t know exactly where he went.

The only organized church in North Carolina during the 1600s was actually Quaker, not Anglican as you might expect. By 1711, an Anglican minister mentioned that he knew of Presbyterians in North Carolina, and noted that in 1705, Huguenots had settled in Bath, which was the first incorporated town in North Carolina. This was the same era when an Englishman named Edward Teach—better known as Blackbeard—was also visiting Bath.

Towns in colonial North Carolina were small. Often the courthouse was the most prominent building, and courthouses were frequently used for visiting preachers. Slaves began to be imported in this era for rice and tobacco plantations toward the coast.

Two Major Groups Bringing Presbyterianism

Two major groups brought Presbyterianism to North Carolina, each with their own distinctive culture and practices.

The Ulster Scots (Scots-Irish)

The first group is the Ulster Scots, or Scots-Irish. These were Scots who, in the 1600s, had moved to Northern Ireland to what was called the Ulster Colony. They didn’t go voluntarily but were moved there by an act of the king to weaken the desire for independence in Scotland. That independent spirit which developed in Northern Ireland then drove them west to America, and they came for religious reasons because of their fervent Presbyterian character.

The Scots-Irish began migrating to the colonies for several reasons: restrictions on selling goods to England, bad growing seasons, and the Test Act, which restricted the ability of Scots-Irish in Ulster to serve as civil and military leaders unless they were members of the Episcopal Church of Ireland. Before the American Revolution, around 200,000 Scots-Irish migrated from Ireland into the colonies.

Many of these settlers, though certainly not all and probably not even the majority, were Presbyterians of some variety. They often landed in Newcastle, Delaware, or Philadelphia and Pennsylvania. They were frequently very poor and set out toward the west and the frontier, which at that time was places like Lancaster, Pennsylvania—not even halfway across the state.

Due to conflicts over land with German immigrants and with Indians, many began to migrate south on what was called the Great Wagon Road. This road came from Lancaster down through the Shenandoah Valley, past Harrisonburg, Virginia, cut through a pass in the mountains outside Lynchburg, and then came down into North Carolina and South Carolina.

As early as the 1720s, the Scots-Irish began to enter North Carolina and settle in the Piedmont and central North Carolina, as well as the Midlands of South Carolina, particularly around Charlotte. Some early communities included the Hillsborough region in Orange County, down toward Salisbury, and around the Charlotte area.

Many of these families brought with them their Bibles, their Shorter Catechisms, and their Scottish metrical psalters that they would sing together. Before churches were established, small groups would gather to recite the catechism together, sing psalms, and read Scripture.

However, it’s important to realize that not all the colonists were religious. A historian estimated religious adherence in the different colonies in 1780, and North Carolina had the lowest rate of religious adherence at only 4 percent. Religious adherence in early colonial America was very, very low.

In general, you can think about the Scots-Irish as settling along what is now I-85 from Durham down to Charlotte. Interestingly, the towns that were prominent then—like Hillsborough and Salisbury—are not necessarily the towns that are prominent now.

The Scottish Highlanders

The second source of Scottish immigrants were the Highlanders from the hills in the north and west part of Scotland. As early as 1729, the Highlanders began to arrive, not in Philadelphia like the Scots-Irish, but at the port of Wilmington. They left Scotland for changing political structures, crop failures, new laws, and various conflicts.

Most Highlanders got on small rafts and boats and went up the Cape Fear River to the area around what is now Fayetteville, which at the time was called Cross Creek. They didn’t particularly stay in Wilmington, which would have been very small at this time. Many of the non-conforming settlers moved out to wilderness areas where they were allowed to practice their religion more freely.

A lot of the Highlanders spoke Gaelic, not English, and maybe some spoke English as well, but Gaelic would have been the language in the home. One historian noted that “the fact that most of the Highlanders spoke only Gaelic protected them from the nearby Baptist missionaries at Sandy Creek and kept them faithful to Presbyterian Calvinism during the many years when they were without the ministrations of a regular pastor.”

Their custom of family worship also kept their faith alive. Children learned the Catechism from their elders, and church officers examined them frequently. In every hearth, there was reverence for the forms of the Scottish Church. The whole family read the Bible aloud every day and repeated the Shorter Catechism.

The Highlanders appear to have been generally more wealthy than the Scots-Irish. They started buying slaves earlier, which is one indication of their greater wealth.

The earliest Presbyterian Church in North Carolina may have been Black River Presbyterian Church, founded by Highlanders from the Argyle region in Scotland around 1740. Black River Presbyterian Church is still a PCUSA congregation today, though it’s now a very small church with about eleven elderly members. The church building there now is from the 1800s, but it’s still a practicing church.

The Challenge of Finding Ministers

It’s hard to know exactly what the earliest churches in North Carolina because the records are haphazard, and it’s unclear what it meant to become a Presbyterian Church when people were meeting informally but weren’t formalized on the rolls of a presbytery. But somewhere around 1740, churches began to come into being.

The Presbyterians who began to gather in North Carolina didn’t have ministers or pastors serving them. Beginning in 1707, and for virtually every year throughout the century, the minutes of the Presbyterian Church contained petitions from congregations and presbyteries pleading for ministers. At least every other year, the Synod of Philadelphia and New York wrote to presbyteries in Scotland or Ireland, begging for ministers to come to the New World.

By the 1740s, there were 160 congregations. After the Revolution, there were about 215 mainline Presbyterian churches in the colonies with ministers and 204 without ministers. So nearly half of the churches still didn’t have ministers, and probably many of those with ministers shared them between multiple congregations.

Part of the challenge in Presbyterianism is that Presbyterians have always emphasized educated ministry. One early minister in North Carolina was examined in 1765 by his presbytery and was quizzed on ontology, pneumatics, ethics, rhetoric, natural philosophy, geography, and astronomy. That’s a high bar for finding a new minister.

There weren’t seminaries for the most part in this era. The first Presbyterian seminary in North America didn’t come until 1793. Ministers would have trained in schools and then been mentored by other ministers to get their training.

By the early 19th century, the mainline Presbyterian Church was quickly overtaken by Baptists, who had the advantage of not necessarily caring as much about educated ministry. Baptists were soon overtaken by Methodists, who had circuit riders able to serve many different churches. There were structural challenges created by Presbyterian commitments to educated ministry that hindered growth simply due to the lack of pastors.

Hugh McAden’s Missionary Journey

One of the most significant events in 18th-century North Carolina Presbyterianism was a missionary journey by a young minister named Hugh McAden in 1755. McAden had just finished his education and been licensed to preach, but he wasn’t yet ordained.

McAden was born in Pennsylvania in 1735 and attended what would become Princeton University. He finished when he was 18 in 1753. In 1755, he was licensed to preach by the New Side Presbytery, which was more on the revivalist side during the First Great Awakening.

Sent by his presbytery, he set off on horseback for a missionary journey to visit Scottish immigrants of all stripes in North and South Carolina. Fortunately, he left a thorough journal of his journey, though unfortunately, the original journal is lost. However, a historian named William Foote had access to the journal for his 1846 work and captured many quotes and content from it.

McAden left Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, headed down through the Shenandoah Valley, crossed through a pass in the mountains, and headed south toward the Danville, Virginia area. He crossed into Orange County, North Carolina, headed down the Great Wagon Road past Charlotte, crossed into South Carolina briefly, looped up through Fayetteville to Wilmington, cut through the middle of eastern North Carolina, back toward Orange County north of Durham, and then headed back north—all within about a year’s time.

As he traveled, he met different groups of Presbyterians, and they would introduce him to others. Someone would ride with him on horseback another twenty miles to meet another group. He would stop and preach, meet with people, and was recruited multiple times by churches trying to extend calls to him as their pastor. None of these churches had pastors at the time.

McAden was willing to preach to any group who would have him. He preached in homes, in the open air, in Baptist churches, and in courthouses—wherever he was able. He observed division among groups due to the influence of Baptist ministers who were starting to appear in the area. His highest compliment as he traveled was when he called a group “pretty regular Presbyterians.”

On his first Sunday in North Carolina, he wrote:

“Having now gotten within the limits prescribed me by the Presbytery, I was resolved not to be so anxious about getting along in my journey, but take some of my time to labor among the people, if so be the Lord might bless it to the advantage of any. May the Lord of his infinite mercy grant his blessing upon my poor attempts, and make me in some way instrumental in turning some of these precious souls from darkness into light, and from the power of Satan unto God, that the power may be known to be of God, and all glory redound to his own name.”

When he preached to some Highlanders in the Fayetteville area, he noted: “I preached to a number of Highlanders. Some of them scarcely knew one word that I said,” since they were Gaelic speakers. He also commented that they were “the poorest singers I ever heard in all my life.”

At one church, he experienced something many pastors would recognize: “I preached in the a.m. to a large and splendid audience, but was surprised when I came again in the p.m. to see about a dozen people met to hear me.”

The First Permanent Ministers

Before leaving North Carolina, McAden met with a minister named James Campbell, a Scotsman who spoke Gaelic. McAden convinced Campbell that he needed to go minister to the Highlanders who spoke Gaelic and needed a pastor. Campbell then ministered among the Highlanders in the Fayetteville area from 1756 to 1773, probably becoming the first permanent Presbyterian minister in North Carolina.

McAden himself later returned to North Carolina to minister in several places, largely along the Virginia border in Caswell County. He died in 1781 and is buried at Red House Church in Caswell County. A couple of weeks after his death, the British came through and destroyed many of his papers.

His son wrote this testimony sixty years after McAden’s death:

“My father was a very systematic man. He always spent one or two days every week in private study. If he walked into fields, he always carried his Bible with him. He visited with his elders once a year, all the families within the bounds of his congregations. He would exhort and pray with them during his stay. He collected all of his congregations once a year at his church and held an examination of those present. He administered the sacrament at each of his churches twice every year. He spent his life attempting to convince all of their sins and rendering happy those who were members of his congregations, respected and beloved by all who knew him.”

In 1765, three more ministers accepted calls in North Carolina: James Criswell in Granville County (the Oxford area), Henry Petillo in Orange County (the Hillsborough area), and David Caldwell in Alamance County (the Greensboro area). These four together were probably the first four Presbyterian ministers in North Carolina.

David Caldwell’s Influence

David Caldwell deserves special attention. He ministered to two congregations together for 52 years, one called Buffalo Presbyterian that still exists today. He opened a school often called “Caldwell’s Log College,” similar to the log college training young men for ministry in New Jersey. His school trained as many as five governors of North Carolina and 50 ministers who would serve in North Carolina.

Two interesting graduates were Barton Stone and James McGready. Barton Stone became a Presbyterian minister but then moved to Kentucky and became involved in what’s known as the Stone-Campbell movement or Restorationist movement, which today exists in the Church of Christ and Disciples of Christ. Stone was particularly involved in the Cane Ridge Revivals in Kentucky, which were part of the early days of the Second Great Awakening.

James McGready also went to Kentucky and became associated with the revival of 1800, where people started having physical reactions called “the jerks” during revival meetings. McGready became involved in forming the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, which was started partly due to pushback against the requirement for educated ministers on the frontier.

By 1770, the Orange Presbytery was formed with six ministers to serve this region.

Revolutionary Period and Beyond

There was significant Presbyterian involvement in events leading up to and during the American Revolution. Before the Revolution, there was something called the Regulator Movement, where rural North Carolinians pushed back against laws, taxes, and corrupt leadership. Interestingly, the Presbyterian ministers at the time were concerned about this rebellion and told the governor that Presbyterians involved were lacking faith, piety, and virtue. However, when the Revolution started, all four ministers became ardent patriots.

Some Highlanders ended up being strong loyalists during the Revolution, and some fled to places like Nova Scotia to escape the conflict.

The Establishment of Raleigh

Notice that we haven’t mentioned Raleigh in this story, and that’s because Raleigh didn’t exist before the Revolution. Raleigh came into being in the late 1700s when the state legislature was convinced to buy 1,000 acres from Joel Lane to form the new capital city.

In 1801, a school called the Raleigh Academy was formed. In 1810, they hired a 32-year-old Presbyterian minister named William McPheeters as headmaster. He probably started holding services in the old state house, which the government opened for groups that didn’t have church buildings yet.

In 1816, McPheeters became pastor of the newly established First Presbyterian Church of Raleigh, which still exists today. One of the initial four ruling elders was William Peace, the namesake of William Peace University in Raleigh, which was historically a Presbyterian college.

Conclusion

By the time of the Revolution, there were around 50 Presbyterian churches in North Carolina. First Presbyterian Church of Raleigh was about the 100th Presbyterian church established in the state.

This story encourages us to remember the faith of the saints who went before us. They were willing to persevere in a foreign land, even without ministers, holding fast to the faith through Scripture, singing, and their catechism. Their faithfulness laid the foundation for the Presbyterian witness that continues in North Carolina today, and we can follow in their faithful steps.

The growth from no Presbyterian churches in 1706 to 100 churches by 1816 represents not just numerical growth, but the faithful witness of ordinary believers who maintained their faith through family worship, catechism instruction, and gathering together whenever possible, even in the absence of ordained clergy. Their example reminds us that the church’s growth depends not just on structures and institutions, but on the faithful witness of believers committed to the means of grace.