Eric Reece
Where Beech Creek and Sweetwater Creek meet in the Cheoah Valley is a majestic hallowed sanctuary, Sweetwater Baptist Church.
This congregation was organized in 1873 to serve the people of the community. At the time, the closest baptist churches were Stecoah and Robbinsville First Baptist: both a good distance when everyone walked or rode a horse and buggy to church.
Van Marcus donated land for the first church building. A one-room sanctuary was built to serve both as a church and school. In 1914, a sanctuary with two Sunday School rooms was built to serve as the church and school.
In 1890, 16-year-old Theo. B. Davis was baptized into the fellowship of Sweetwater. He would go on to serve as a Baptist minister, leader and newspaper publisher. It is said he was the first from Robbinsville to graduate from a seminary: Southern Baptist Seminary in Louisville, Ky. He was the first state secretary of the Baptist Training Union in North Carolina and superintendent of the Kennedy Children’s home in Kinston.
The Biblical Recorder (Sept. 17, 1902) reported this good news: “Rev. W. C. Morgan, pastor of Sweetwater church, has greatly revived the church. There were twelve professions. Differences in the church were reconciled.”
The next church building was built in 1924 on a knoll near the current site. Thomas Rogers donated the land and William Buchanan provided the lumber.
This served the community until the current sanctuary was built.
With the baby boom following World War II – and the congregation growing – a new church building was needed. In 1948, the Rev. Harvey Phillips was pastor and led the congregation in the building of the current sanctuary.
There was a TVA gymnasium being demolished at Fontana. The congregation raised $1,800 and purchased the building. The native river rock was removed and hauled to Sweetwater and the interior building was moved to the present site.
Around this time, Floyd Griffin obtained a veterans program to teach construction skills to returning veterans. They did much of the construction work on the church.
The interior paneling of the sanctuary is beautiful American chestnut. The native stone exterior has grapevine mortar joints, which outline and emphasize the shape of the individual stone masonry. It is used in a number of the older stone buildings in the area.
The years following World War II was the heyday of religious buildings in America. Many Baptist churches added indoor baptistries out of necessity. Sweetwater was the first in the area to include an indoor baptistry in their sanctuary.
In “An Old Love for New Things: Southern Baptists and the Modern Technology of Indoor Baptisteries,” Journal of Southern Religion 13 (2011), Chad E. Seales wrote: “In their promotion and construction of indoor baptisteries, Baptists bounded the primitive within the modern. As long as they continued to practice what they considered the primitive Christian rite of baptism by immersion, Baptists could maintain their distinguishing essence while perpetually modernizing their congregations.”
Eric Reece is the faith columnist for The Graham Star. He is pastor of Robbinsville United Methodist Church and can be reached via email, ereece@wnccumc.net.