A Coat of Many Colors: Religion and Society along the Cape Fear River of North Carolina

Introduction

1 Introduction Introduction A highway traveler approaching Wilmington, North Carolina, from the west reaches a rise in the road where the city first comes into view. Within the panorama of trees, homes, and commercial buildings , one of the most striking sights is the series of steeples that punctuate the skyline. This scene should not be surprising, for there are more than 325 churches, temples, and mosques in Wilmington today. The silhouette of the city and the index of its religious organizations remind one of the prominence of religion—architecturally , socially, economically, and otherwise—in Wilmington and in the Cape Fear region, both in the past and in the present. The Cape Fear includes the nine current counties of New Hanover , Pender, Brunswick, Columbus, Bladen, Sampson, Duplin, Robeson, and Cumberland that form the southeastern portion of North Carolina and through which the Cape Fear River and its assorted tributaries flow. Covering about 15 percent of the state’s area, the Cape Fear has played and continues to play an important role in North Carolina’s history. It was home initially to Native Americans whose presence dates back ten thousand years or more; European colonists moved into the Southeast in the early 1600s. Ever since its incorporation in 1739, Wilmington has served as the area’s commercial and political metropolis, the center on which the periphery’s products and people converged. Beyond that, from the 1840s until the 1920s and the rise of the Piedmont cities, Wilmington was the largest urban center in the state. Situated on the Cape Fear River, the harbor of Wilmington also provid- 2 A Coat of Many Colors ed the only direct access to the Atlantic Ocean among all of North Carolina’s river ports. Tethered to the political and economic fortunes of the eastern part of the state, the Cape Fear was one of the few places in North Carolina to have large-scale slave plantations; it also had one of the state’s earliest and longest railroads and, as the site of blockade running and the fall of Fort Fisher, was intimately linked with the rise and defeat of the Confederate forces in the Civil War. More recently , the region’s population has surged as new residents from the North flock to its beaches and suburbs, and Wilmington has been nicknamed the “Hollywood of the East” for the number of television shows and motion pictures produced there. Against this backdrop, the story of religion in southeastern North Carolina has been largely ignored. Yet it is a fascinating history , one that can be told on at least three different levels. First, it is the story of a region with Wilmington as its symbolic center. As the metropolitan hub of the area and the largest city in the state for several decades, Wilmington attracted many immigrants who settled there and in its environs. These immigrants—whether voluntary or forced—brought their religions with them, and soon a flourishing religious life in Wilmington and throughout the region was under way. By the end of the twentieth century, religious expansion and expressions of religious diversity could be seen in all parts of the region, from Wilmington to Fayetteville, from the Lower through the Middle to the Upper Cape Fear. Wilmington, in fact, was something of a microcosm of this growth and diversity. By 2000 metropolitan Wilmington had two Jewish congregations, one of which was the oldest in the state, and two Islamic groups. A Buddhist temple and a Russian Orthodox community stood a little ways outside the city limits. The Roman Catholic presence dates back to the 1820s, and Greek Orthodox parishioners organized in the twentieth century. A multitude of Protestant faiths are evident, including Baptists and Lutherans and United Methodists, with Episcopalians, Moravians, Presbyterians, and a handful of others rounding out the roster. Religious groups that started in the United States, such as the Mormons, the Adventists, the Christian Scientists, and the Jehovah ’s Witnesses, also have a place here. In a narrative that spans prehistory to the opening of the twenty- first century, it is inevitable that not every congregation in the re- Introduction 3 gion can be covered and that the discussion of any given congregation may not be as thorough as the store of knowledge possessed by its members. Nevertheless, historical synthesis as represented in this volume can illustrate patterns that congregational and denominational histories often lose. To be sure, attention will be...