10. Hear Pastor Moses preach.

Dating back to 1846, First Baptist Church in Nicholasville is one of the oldest continually running churches in Jessamine County. For nearly two centuries—through slavery, Jim Crow, and desegregation—it has been a site of Black spiritual resilience and resistance to American racism.

 

The preaching style of Pastor Moses exemplifies these postures. In terms of content, it’s forthright about sin and full of gospel hope. In terms of style, it’s upbeat and motivational. According to scholar Albert Raboteau, Black preaching typically begins with conversational language and then gradually accelerates in speed and rhythm. You’ll hear this in Pastor Moses’s preaching. He’ll chant his words to a regular beat and then reach a peak as his speech takes on musical embellishments and merges with the clapping and shouting of the congregation.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Amidst this sonic atmosphere, take in the distinctive interior. Especially the right side of the sanctuary, where a stained-glass window features a fascinating figure in the congregation’s history. Napoleon Price was born enslaved and sold at least once, as a fifteen-year-old, on Nicholasville’s slave auction block. The Civil War proved truly emancipatory for Price. Enslaved by Harvey Huggins during the war, Price escaped and enlisted at Camp Nelson. He became a free man for the first time in his thirty-seven years.

 

Price prospered. Within five years, he accumulated $800 worth of real estate as a carpenter. Having never been outside Kentucky during slavery, he traveled to eleven states and even a foreign country. He became a voter and most significantly, he said, “a free loyal American citizen.”  Voters in Herveytown, which comprised Ward 4 in Nicholasville’s electoral map, swept Price and other Black candidates to victory in elections for the town council. In 1893 Price, who pressed for Union pensions for Black veterans, won with 143 votes and no opposition.

 

Herveytown was also the home of First Baptist, then called African Baptist Church. It was full, says one congregational history, of “ex-slaves, unlearned men and women of meager earnings.” Within several decades, they learned to read and write and build businesses. In addition to Price, the congregation included a mortician, a barber, and a teacher. Members of the church also incorporated the Jessamine County Building and Saving Association to give members access to home mortgages not available from white-owned banks.

 

This era of Black resilience, then, was also marked by racial inequality and white oppression. In the year 1890 over 105 whites from Jessamine owned property worth $10,000 or more. Seven owned property worth more than $40,000. By contrast, the “leading colored tax-payers of Nicholasville,” as the Jessamine Journal put it, numbered only five. Among them was Napoleon Price, who owned land worth $1,125. Price may have incorporated a bank, flourished in his church work, and championed Memorial Day commemorations, but none of these things saved his son Willie, a slender sixteen-year-old shot in the back by two drunken white men in 1888. Six years later, on the very same newspaper page that profiled Price as “an encouragement” of “worldly advancement,” there was an advertisement for Hotel Nicholas that limited service to “white people only.” Worst of all, there were at least fourteen lynchings between the Civil War and 1902.

 

Despite this, Napoleon Price displayed remarkable hospitality. In 1893 he invited “all friends and citizens” to Memorial Day at Camp Nelson. In 1896 he invited “all loyal citizens, both white and colored.”

 

Try to time your visit with First Baptist’s celebration of Black History in the month of February. It is held at 11 a.m. on the fourth Sunday.

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