Information Sheet

 

 

R         Mount Lebanon Baptist Church (Ozark County, Mo.).

382                  Records, 1847‑ca. 1967.

                                    Two folders, photocopies.

 

 

 

These are minutes of meetings, 1847‑1909, and membership records, ca. 1852‑1967, of the Mount Lebanon Baptist Church near Thornfield in Ozark County, Missouri.  The church was founded in 1847 as the Mount Lebanon Church of General Baptists.

 

The Mount Lebanon Baptist Church was organized on 2 January 1847.  The charter mem­bers were Samuel Piland, his wife, Martha, and the Rev. Thomas Norris and his wife, Penina, a sister of Samuel Piland.  The Pilands and Norrises came to Missouri in 1846 from Henderson County, Kentucky.  They settled in Ozark County, near what came to be the site of Thornfield.  The church was named after the Mount Lebanon General Baptist Church of Kentucky, where Thomas Norris had been baptized and where he began to preach the gospel.

 

Mount Lebanon was the first General Baptist church in Missouri, and is thought to be the first of the faith to be established west of the Mississippi River.  The congregation grew quickly, numbering almost forty members by 1851.  The church survived the Civil War, and helped to found other General Baptist congregations in the postwar period.  In 1866 Mount Lebanon be­came a charter member of the Missouri Association of General Baptists, com­posed of churches in Mis­souri, Arkansas, and Indian Territory.  The Missouri Association was the parent organization from which the Little Vine and White River associations were formed in 1877 and 1882.

 

The church still exists as a viable congregation though its numbers are somewhat re­duced.  Church member Shirley Carter Piland examined the history of the church, its members and min­is­ters in the West Plains Gazette (1986).

 

 

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