Gilead in the Old Testament Scriptures was a mountain range of Palestine, used to designate a northern region of the Holy Land.  It was doubtless the geographical suggestiveness of southern Indiana’s almost mountainous hills, with deep valleys lying between, which made “Gilead” the name chosen for a congregation organized in 1817 by devout Baptists living in Tobin Township, Perry County.

Their leader, the Reverend Charles Polk, had represented Perry county a year earlier in the Constitutional Convention at Corydon and belonged to a family whose name is written on many pages of American history.

An Immense horse-shoe bend of the Ohio river, scant two miles and a half across at its narrowest point, is washed by some fifteen miles of the stream’s devious course, and a section of southern Indiana have retained more of their pioneer families to the present day.  Lineal descendants in the same name occupy in many instances the identical lands entered over a century ago by their ancestors.

The minutes of actual organization, originally written on loose sheets of paper, were destroyed by fire some years ago while accidentally separated from the other records, but the roll of charter members is fortunately intact.  From a brown-backed volume which is the first of a series leading down to the present the list is copied, as read aloud on Sunday, September 2, 1917, by the late William Riley Polk (a grandson of the founder) at the Centennial service held in the present Gilead church at Tobinsport.

Forty-six names equally divided between males and females make up the roster of those who signed the Old Gilead’s charter:  Charles Polke (as the name was spelled for a generation or two), Thomas Polk, Thomas Sandage, Thomas Richardson, James Wilson, Edward Erskine, Elisha Edwards, James G. Jones, George Ewing, Sr., Smith Winchel, John Riggs, Nathaniel Harris, Ewing Brown, Luther Latimer, Daniel Chapman, Charles Roff, John Thrasher, John Hall, Ira A. Blachard, Alex Mahan, William Bolin, Orlean Blanchard, John Kelly, Catherine Polke, Catherine Blanchard, Fanna Harris, Fanna Drinkwater, Willey Polke, Susannah Brough, Polly Riggs, Nancy Christ, Rachael Sandage, Elizabeth Richardson, Anna Winchel, Anna Erskine, Amy Litherland, Eada Roff, Casandra Bolin, Hannah Read, Mary Sandage, Abigale Ewing, Rachael Ewing.

Exactly where Gilead congregation was formally organized is nowhere found on record, but in all probability worship was first held in private homes.  Although time has deepened into yellow the once white pages of the initial volume, while the ink is correspondingly faded, the entries penned with goose quill of the period one hundred and four years ago this very day, October 11, 1817, are still legible and give curious insight into religious customs practiced by our forefathers in The Pocket a century ago. 

In the minutes for this date it is related how: “After prayer, Sister Anna Askins laid accusation against Sister Rebecca Gilbert for saying that she had gone with Sister Catey Polke to the mouth of Clover creek (the present Cloverport, Kentucky) to buy a pair of geese on a Sunday.”  It was also alleged that the same sisters were accused by the other of “Singing Black-guard Songs,” and in retaliation Sisters Askins and Polke frankly charged Sister Gilbert with misdemeanors not mentionable in polite society today, though plainly set forth in a quaint old record.

May 3, 1818, it appears that services were held in the log Meeting-House on Milstone (now Millstone) creek.  This served for worship up to August, 1830, when the Central Meeting-House was built, a few miles farther up the river, near Simon’s Mill, and was occupied jointly by the Baptist and Methodists for over forty years.

In July, 1819, it is stated: “Church agreed that at September meeting the Communion be observed and afterward the washing of one another’s feet shall be practiced.” 

The Gilead Society was first affiliated with Salem Association, but in the meeting of July, 1920, (at which Thomas Sandage was “licensed to exhort” {advise}) it was agreed to join the more accessible Goshen Association in Breckinridge County, Kentucky.  Brothers Samuel Anderson, Adam Shoemaker, Thomas Polk and Israel Lamb were in September appointed delegates to effect this.

In August, 1821, the Rev. Charles Polk, Thomas Tobin, Thomas Sandage and Edward Erskine were chosen delegates to sit in council at Little Pigeon (creek) about forming an association of neighboring Indiana churches, which was formally accomplished on October 20, 1821.  Its title became “The Little Pigeon Association of United Baptist of America.”  The Rev. Charles Polk was elected Moderator and Solomon Lamb (also of Perry County), Clerk.  A historical sketch of the Association’s hundred years of existence has been written by J. Edwin Howe, of Cannetlon, and will be later presented by him to the Southwestern Indiana Historical Society of which he is a member.

The “Little Pigeon” church – which took its name from the creek nearby – is widely known as that Spencer county organization near Gentryville to which belonged Thomas and Sarah (Bush) Lincoln, the father and stepmother of Abraham Lincoln, where the boy Abraham after earnest personal entreaty obtained the preaching of his own mother’s funeral sermon some years later after Nancy Hanks Lincoln had been laid to her long unmarked grave.  In its rural cemetery sleeps Sarah Lincoln Grisby, the President’s only sister.

According to various entries in Gilead’s minute-book there would seem to have been a series of altercations between these Associations, but in April, 1826, the Perry county church was probably a member of the Kentucky body.  At that meeting Abigail Ewing, Rachael Ewing and Ewing Brown withdrew their letters “on account of union with salve-holders.”  These parties were of the family of George Ewing, Sr., the New Jersey veteran of the American Revolution whose remains were removed in 1907 from the Millstone burying ground to Cliff Cemetery, Cannelton, and whose biography was presented before the May, 1921 meeting of this Society.

The issue of slavery must have been a matter left to individual conscience, as no reference to it appears in the “Articles of Faith and Order”, drawn up in 1822 by the Rev. Charles Polk and Thomas Sandage and which are still creed of Gilead Church.  Ten years later Ira A. Blachard, one of the charter members, was licensed to preach and on the Rev. Charles Polk’s death in 1836 succeeded him as pastor.

Space forbids even the briefest mention of many highly interesting entries.  In 1849 it was “By query agreed, that members taking part in plays and other parties then going on were out of order.”  It is curious to read in October 1854, the church “agreed to support a German missionary,” although no results of such effort was ever perceptible.

Robert Tobin, a nephew of the Rev. Charles Polk (through the marriage of Thomas Tobin to Sarah Polk) was chosen Permanent Clerk in October, 1857, and held the office until his death in 1898 after a long career of usefulness to both church and state.  He served as joint-senator from Perry and Spencer counties in the Legislatures of 1875-1877, was well-preserved up to the end and was the latest survivor to describe from personal recollection the accidental visit of General de Lafayette to Perry county, following the wreck of the steamer Mechanis in May, 1835, at Rock Island.  As a nine-year-old lad young Robert Tobin walked with his parents from their home down to what is now “Lafayette Springs”, in order to greet the famous hero.

The issue of woman’s rights was settled favorably to the good sisters of Gilead in September, 1874, when the query “whether a sister can be appointed a delegate to Association” was reported as “Found of good order” and has ever since been customary.

During this year, plans were broached for a new church edifice, the Central Meeting-House to be left exclusively to the Methodists.  Robert Tobin, William Riley Polk, John D. Cockeral, B.F. Boultinghouse, Jeff Hawkins, J.H. Lamb, and J.H. Hyde were the building committee designated.  One hundred dollars was paid for the site of the present structure, erected two years later near the steamboat landing at the Point and directly opposite the present Tobinsport High School.

It was completed in the year of the National Centennial and dedicated on Sunday, September 2, 1876, hence there was especially appropriate sentiment in circumstance that “Old Gilead’s” own Centennial Sermon was preached within the walls forty-one years later to the day, Sunday, September 2, 1917, marking at the same time the closing of the ninety-sixth annual association of the Perry County Missionary Baptists.

An interesting feature of this occasion was the loan of the Rev. Charles Polk’s Bible, on it fly-leaf inscribed with his own signature in a clerky hand: “Charles Polke, his Bible.  Bought of Martin Wickliffe, Bardtown, May 1814.  Price, $9.”  it is a massive sheepskin covered volume printed in 1811 by Mathew Carey, at 122 Market street, Philadelphia.

Indication that the sacred book was once in pawn is given by a promise written on the back inter cover, reading: “I will by the first of April, 1814, take this Bible at $9.  If I can pay the cash at that time.  I will at all events pay 4 1/2 then 4 1/2 in a few weeks.  Let no man have it.  I cannot take it now. (Signed) William Downs.”  That this pledge was never redeemed may be referred from it purchase a month later by Charles Polk at the county seat of Nelson County, Kentucky, always a stronghold of Maryland immigrants into the Middle West, and from whence Polk himself came into Indiana, entering his Perry county lands in 1807-08 in what was then Knox county.

The Bible, with its accurate family records, is now the property of the Rev. Charles Polk’s great-granddaughter, Mrs. James H. Payne of Tobinsport formerly Ada Polk Miller, a member of the Southwestern Indiana Historical Society, whose assistance has made possible this sketch of her ancestor.