Location: US 74 at SR 1005 (Prison Camp Road) northwest of Rockingham
County: Richmond
Original Date Cast: 1968
Begun about 1774 as Dockery’s Meeting House with leadership from Thomas Dockery, Cartledge Creek Baptist Church is most noted for hosting in 1833 a meeting of the Baptist State Convention which led to the founding of what is now Wake Forest University. The initial meetings of the congregation were in the home of Thomas Dockery, a major landowner. He had moved to the area from Maryland around 1769. The first minister was the Rev. Daniel Thomas who also had moved from Maryland.
Buildings to house the church were constructed around 1800, 1826, and 1869. At the 1833 meeting Thomas Meredith, founder of the Biblical Recorder, was appointed chairman of the committee to lay the groundwork for the new school. The convention then elected a committee of forty men to serve as trustees and chose five to secure the necessary incorporation from the legislature. Samuel Wait’s journal indicates that the weather at the 1833 meeting was “remarkably pleasant” and the accommodations “most ample.”
Thomas Dockery’s grandson, Alfred Dockery, was an antebellum Congressman and, in the postwar period, a leader of the Republican Party in North Carolina. The younger Dockery kept the church going, largely at his own expense, in the years after the Civil War.
References:
James E. and Ida C. Huneycutt, A History of Richmond County (1976)
George W. Paschal, History of Wake Forest College, I (1935)
Catherine W. Bishir and Michael T. Southern, A Guide to the Historic Architecture of Piedmont North Carolina (2003)
Wake Forest Magazine (February 1957)
Rockingham Post-Dispatch, December 31, 1931
Rockingham County Journal, March 3, 1954
Anson County and Richmond County Deed Books, North Carolina State Archives