Mt. Horeb Baptist

In the 1830s, a church was erected and named Rocky Mount, but in 1838, a division in the Georgia Baptist Association caused members of this original church to go their separate ways. In 1848, eight members of the original church formed Mt. Horeb in former Dooly County, which became Worth County in 1853. The first house of worship was a log house on the banks of the Flint River in a community called Pindertown along the stageroad that connected Milledgeville to Tallahassee.

Just before the Civil War, the congregation of Mt. Horeb Baptist had grown to 160 members, but after the war, their structure burned and the future was unclear for the church. Until 1868 when Mrs. Celia Evelyn Sutton Ross Buckalew donated land near Abrams Creek for the church to be rebuilt as a memorial to her late husband James F. Buckalew. By October 1868, they had a new church at the new site where it still stands today.

But more challenges lie ahead for the congregation when an outbreak of Hemorrhagic Fever caused by mosquitoes and poor drinking water caused many to leave the area. Around 1902, church services ceased and the building and cemetery began to deteriorate for several years. In 1914, Mrs. Nettie Hall Woolard and Mr. Robert M. Deariso called the descendants of the original members together, and the group decided to meet annually on the fourth Sunday in August. Deariso, the grandson of Mrs. Buckalew re-recorded the deed on September 8, 1915, as a matter of public record. In more recent years the tradition has been carried on with an annual meeting at the church for worship and cleaning. According to 

According to Mrs. Nel Thompson, a descendant of the church founders, “Mt. Horeb Church looks much the same today as it did in its glory days. We sit in the same pews our ancestors used and hear the same words of faith preached from the same pulpit they did. People with family names that appear in the records of Rocky Mount, Old Mt. Horeb, and Mt. Horeb Churches join together with the ghosts of the past on every fourth Sunday in August in the fellowship of ‘love to the cause of Christ.”