Location: Old NC 191 southeast of Mills River
County: Henderson
Original Date Cast: 1949
The earliest record of the French Broad Baptist Church is in the minutes of the Bethel Association of Upper South Carolina. The church was admitted into the association in 1792, suggesting that it was organized sometime prior. The church’s cemetery is the earliest consecrated burial ground in that part of Buncombe County that is now Henderson County. The 1808 grave of Leah Grady, the grandmother of journalist Henry Woodfin Grady, was the first in the cemetery.
In 1800 the French Broad Church, along with other Baptist churches in the area, left the Bethel Association in order to form the Broad River Association. As the Baptist faith proliferated the association further divided.
In 1807 representatives from several western North Carolina Baptist churches met at French Broad Church, the mother church in the vicinity, and formed the French Broad Association, the first west of the Blue Ridge.
After the Civil War the church moved to a location in Hendersonville more central to its congregation. The current sanctuary, the church’s fourth, was built in 1977.
References:
Sadie Smathers Patton, (1982)
George Washington Paschal, History of North Carolina Baptists, 2 vols. (1930, 1955)
French Broad Baptist Church website: http://frenchbroadbaptistchurch.com/