First United Negro Baptist Church of the Abyssinia

The First United Negro Baptist Church of the Abyssinia links a contemporary church fire to the recovery of Henry Shackleford’s long-hidden account. Its congregation becomes custodian of a story about John Brown and the struggle against slavery, even as the fire turns that history into a question of evidence, memory, and who gets to publish it.

Church and Congregation

The church stood at Fourth and Bainbridge Streets. A late deacon, Charles D. Higgins, had presided from his chair behind the pulpit every Sunday for more than forty-three years. Congregants knew him affectionately as “Mr. Whopper” and “Deacon Shimmy Wimmy.” He was the congregation’s eldest member, though his exact age at death was unknown; members estimated that he had been nearly one hundred. He had no children and had worked for twenty-nine years as a cook for Mrs. Arlene Ellis of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

Higgins also brought the Civil War into local civic life. He attended city council meetings in period regalia and petitioned for Dupont Highway to be renamed “John Brown Road.” The proposed name makes the church’s later discovery of an account associated with Henry Shackleford especially resonant: the congregation’s interest in John Brown had been visible in public life before the notebooks emerged.

Fire and Hidden Cache

A fire destroyed the church; officials blamed a faulty gas heater, and no one was injured. Among the scorched remains were notebooks belonging to the late Higgins, attracting national academic interest. The account itself had been kept in a metal fireproof box beneath the floorboards of his chair behind the pulpit.

The box also held twelve Confederate dollars, a rare feather from the nearly extinct ivory-billed woodpecker, and a note from Higgins’s late wife. These objects place the manuscript beside intimate and historical keepsakes rather than presenting it as an isolated document. The contrast between the fire-damaged notebooks and the cache’s survival makes the discovery depend on a hidden act of preservation.

Questions of Memory and Verification

A surviving 1942 church registry lists Mr. Shackleford, but no one in the current congregation is old enough to remember him. The record therefore provides a documentary trace without living confirmation. The account arrives not through a remembered witness but through a damaged archive and a box concealed beneath a deacon’s chair.

The congregation plans to submit the account to an expert in Negro history for verification and then sell the notebooks for publication. The proceeds are intended to help buy a new church van. In this decision, historical preservation and immediate institutional need meet directly: the congregation seeks both to establish the account’s credibility and to turn its publication into practical support for the church.

Narrative Significance

The church frames the account as a contested act of transmission. Higgins’s position behind the pulpit, the concealed box, the surviving registry, and the planned expert review each mark a different stage between private custody and public history. The proposed publication may carry the story beyond the congregation, but its authority remains tied to evidence that the fire nearly erased and to a person no current member can recall.

The church’s public interest in John Brown, expressed in Higgins’s campaign to rename a highway, also complicates the manuscript’s recovery: the account enters a community already attached to his legacy. The congregation’s choice to seek verification acknowledges that attachment is not itself proof, while its plan to fund a van through publication shows that preserving historical testimony is inseparable from the church’s present-day life.