The Centennial Anniversary
of the First Presbyterian Church
of Knoxville, Tennessee

and the Semi-Centennial Anniversary of
the Ministry of Rev. James Park, D. D.

NOTE:  The sources of information drawn from in this discourse, besides the records of this particular Church Session, the traditions which have come down through our old people, and the reminiscences of the author, who was born and bred in the congregation, are Dr. Charles Hodge's History of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A.; Dr. W. H. Foote's Sketches of North Carolina; Dr. J. E. Alexander's Brief History of the Synod of Tennessee; Dr. J. G. M. Ramsey's Annals of Tennessee; the Minutes of the Synod of the Carolinas; the Historical Discourse of Rev. R. B. McMullen, pastor of this Church in 1855, and his historical manuscript, now in the possession of Rev. John H. Bryson. The author also acknowledges his indebtedness for valuable thoughts and matter to the late Dr. H. A. Boardman, of Philadelphia, and the late Dr. S. I. Prime, of New York.

Centennial Anniversary

The year 1896, from the best information attainable, completed the One Hundredth year of the existence of the First Presbyterian Church, of Knoxville, Tenn., and the Fiftieth year of the ministry of Rev. James Park, who, for more than thirty years has been the pastor of the Church.  The Session arranged to celebrate these events, and the exercises were held in Staub's Opera House on the evening of October 11, 1896.  The Presbytery of Knoxville, at its regular meeting in September, appointed a committee consisting of Rev. J. W. Bachman, D. D., and Rev. T. H. McCallie, D. D., to attend the celebration and bear the greetings of the body to the Church and its pastor on the occasion.  There were also present on the platform several pastors in the city:  Rev. R.L. Bachman, of the Second Presbyterian Church; Rev. E.A. Elmore, of the Fourth Presbyterian Church; Rev. R. R. Acree, of the First Baptist Church; Rev. J. H. Frazee, of the Pilgrim Congregational, and Rev. G. Chandler, of the Central Presbyterian Church.

Rev. Sam'l Ringgold, pastor of St. John's Episcopal Church, was hindered from attending by illness, as was Rev. J. W. Jones, of the First M.E. Church. Rev. H. D. Moore, of the Church Street M. E. Church, South, was detained at Conference.  Rev. Messrs. McCallie, Acree and Frazee made short addresses of congratulation after the discourse by the pastor.  After the devotional exercises Rev. J. W. Bachman made the following address:

Presbyterial Greetings

At its last meeting, the Presbytery of Knoxville, having heard that you proposed to hold these exercises, commissioned Rev. T. H. McAllen, D.D., and myself to bear to you its fraternal and Episcopal greetings.  It is with great pleasure that we appear before you to perform this duty.

The Presbytery tenders its congratulations to the Church, and gives thanks to God that you have had grace and strength to stand so long as the pillar and ground of the Truth in this city.  In all the history of the past, in the days of your prosperity, and in the times when you were called to suffer for His sake, you have stood for the Truth of God as it is in His word and our Confession.  You have been loyal to Him and we rejoice to believe that this day He is to your children and your children's children the "chiefest among ten thousand and the one altogether lovely."

And we congratulate you on possessing and maintaining so long such a faithful teacher of Jesus Christ.  You have had him not for yourselves alone, but for the whole Church.  You have given him, when necessary, to declare the word to all the regions around.  We record it to your praise that there are few valleys and hills from Lookout Mountain to the extreme eastern limit of the State which have not heard the glad tidings of salvation from his mouth.

The Presbytery greets you in Christian love, and prays that you may continue faithful and abound in good works.

And to you, my dear brother, the Presbytery sends its greetings of love and fellowship as to a faithful and well-beloved elder brother.  We rejoice before God this day for the grace which has enable you to stand so long as a man and minister, exemplifying and proclaiming the everlasting Gospel of the Son of God.  You have shown yourself a man among men, as this community can well testify, and demonstrated a manhood "more precious than fine gold."  Your brethren, beside whom you have stood in the varied experiences of life and work, know that in days of necessity they could command every hour of your time and every dollar of your purse.

The Presbytery renders devout thanksgiving to Almighty God that you have shown yourself such a faithful minister of Jesus Christ, doing only the work to which you were commissioned fifty years ago.  You have not shunned to declare the whole counsel of God, fearing only Him whose you are and whom you serve.  Presbytery bid us say that you live not only in our memories, but in our hearts and prayers.

But before we close, allow us to say that the Presbytery of Knoxville desires it to be understood that the oneness of God is the duality of humanity, and it therefore sends its greetings to her who has so long walked and worked by your side as a true helpmeet, like Phebe of old, "a servant of he Church and a succourer of many"; and recognizes her as a beloved and faithful sister in Jesus Christ.  Her children have a right to stand up before her and call her blessed, and her husband to praise her.

We have discharged our mission and rejoice with you and your people.  We are duly sensible of the fact that we shall never see the like of this hour again, but the future holds for us only good.  We are facing a rising sun which shall never cease to shine, and have entered upon a life that will never end.  Our next centennial exercises will be on the hills of God with the general assembly and church of the first.

Till that time we bid you God speed in the way of Holiness.  It is our united prayer that the Church may be kept faithful unto death -- that your bow may abide in strength and your eye remain undimmed till you see the "King in His beauty."

Dr. Park then delivered the following:

Historical Discourse.

"Seek the Lord and his strength:  Seek his face forever more.  Remember his marvelous works that he hath done; his wonders and the judgements of his mouth." -- Psalm 105:4-5

The Book of Psalms is a marvelous part of the word of God.  The subjects which it presents for our meditation, instruction and education are as numerous and varied as the conditions and experience of God's people amid the vicissitudes of their earthly pilgrimage.

In 1776 the Right Reverend George Horne, Lord Bishop of Norwich, and President of Magdalen College, Oxford, completed and published his Commentary on the Psalms, upon which he had spent many years of study and labor; and when his publisher was carrying the first printed copies to the University, in reply to a friend who asked what he had there, said:  "It is a new work of the President of Magdalen, whose former productions have given him a name; but his will render his name immortal."

In his preface Bishop Horne says: "the Psalms are an epitome of the Bible, adapted to the purpose of devotion.  They treat of the creation and formation of the world; the dispensations of providence, and the economy of grace; the transactions of the patriarchs; the exodus of the children of Israel; the journey through the wilderness, and settlement in Canaan; their laws, priesthood and ritual; the exploits of their great men, wrought through faith; their sins and captivities; their repentances and restorations; the sufferings and victories of David; the peaceful and happy reign of Solomon; the advent of Messiah, with its effects and consequences; his incarnation, birth, life, passion, death, resurrection, ascension, kingdom and priesthood; the effusion of the Spirit; the conversion of the nations; the rejection of the Jews; the establishment, increase and perpetuity of the Christian Church; the end of the world; the general judgment; the condemnation of the wicked, and final triumph of the righteous with their Lord and King."

The 105th Psalm is evidently designed, and well adapted to comfort God's people by the truths of history, and so they are called upon to "remember his marvelous works that he hath done; his wonders and the judgments of his mouth."  It is good and profitable for us devoutly to recount the mercies of God, and the wonders of his providence, and, like Israel of old, to erect our Ebenezers.

We are here now to commemorate the one hundredth anniversary of the First Presbyterian Church of Knoxville, and the fifieth year of my Gospel Ministry.  The First Presbyterian Church is literally the first, the oldest, the original church of this city.  As the human personality retains its identity despite the changes which take place in the material substance of the body and the progress and development of the intellectual and moral faculties, so a church, or organized body of believers, retains its identity through all the changes which take place in its constituent members, as generation succeeds generation, and years grow into decades, and scores, and centuries.  And so we speak of this church as having seen its one hundred years roll by since it first became an organized body of believers, although none of us, now present, ever saw an individual, who, in the beginning of it, constituted one of its members.

The first pastor, the first bench of elders and all the first members of it, were gathered to their fathers more than three score years ago, and nearly all those who made up the body of it fifty years ago have gone to swell the mighty throng the grave -- and those of that period who yet remain are only five -- four women and one man.  The constituency of the church and congregation of today is radically different from that of 1796, or that of fifty years ago; yet we speak of if as the same church and congregation, because its organic form has been preserved, its Confession of Faith maintained, its form of government adhered to, and its ordinances administered, though years have come and gone and generation after generation has passed away.

On an occasion like this, it would be impossible to give in detail the history of a church which has been in existence one hundred years, even if all the material, including dates, personalities, statistics and actual moral influence were known to us.  The merest skeleton out-line is all that can be attempted.  Only Almighty God, who knows all things, knows what has been accomplished for the good of men, and the welfare of this land, and the glory of his name, by this church, in the one hundred years now gone to be blended with the years before the flood.  An evangelical, orthodox, Christian church in which the truth of God as revealed in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments is preached, and the ordinances, must be a power for good in any community.  And this we claim for the old First Church of Knoxville, from its genesis down through all the years of its existence.  As has been said of another, it "has represented in happy combination, the social worth, the commercial integrity, the high professional ability, and the patient consciencious God fearing industry of this community" in every period of its history, and has exerted a salutary influence not only in the town, but in the State, and country, and distant ends of the earth.

On Sunday, July 2nd, 1876, I preached a discourse touching the history of this Church, since which time I have discovered some flagrant inaccuracies in the statements then unknown to me.  In regard to the planting of the Presbyterian Church in America, it is not expedient now to speak.  In 1758 the Presbytery of Hanover, Virginia, was erected.  It was from the Presbytery that the first Presbyterian ministers came into what was a wilderness, but is now the State of Tennessee, viz.:  Samuel Doak, Hezekiah Balch and Charles Cummins; and these three were set off from Hanover Presbytery in 1785, and formed the Presbytery of Abingdon, bounded by New River on the side next to Hanover Presbytery, or east, by the Presbytery of Orange, or the south, and with no limit westward.

Mr. Doak was the first minister to make his residence in what is now Tennessee.  He came to this region probably in 1778, having located a while in Southwestern Virginia, and settled in 1780 on Little Limestone Creek, in what is now known as Washington County, Tennessee, and organized Salem Church, which is still in existence.

On the 25th of October, 1782, Reverend Samuel Carrick was licensed by Hanover Presbytery, and in November, 1783, he was ordained, and installed pastor of Wahab and Rocky Spring churches, Virginia, where he labored several years, and in 1787, visited this section; but is certain that he did not at that time penetrate the wilderness as far as what is now the territory of Knox County.  This is certified by a letter dated March 9th, 1789, written by Mr. Reynolds Ramsey, of Rockbridge County, Va., to his son (the late Colonel Frank A. Ramsey, a pioneer in this section, and father of the late Dr. J. G. M. Ramsey, of this city), in which he acknowledges the receipt of a letter from his son (then in what is now Upper East Tennessee) by his the hands of Mr. Carrick, who had returned to Virginia from this region.  Mr. Carrick was dismissed from Hanover Presbytery to unite with the Presbytery of Abingdon, 1791, so the statement made in my discourse in 1876, that he organized Lebanon Church in 1798 and this Church in the same year or 1790 is clearly erroneous.

In 1791, having procured his dismission from Hanover Presbytery to the Presbytery of Abingdon, Mr. Carrick returned to what is now Tennessee, and stopped awhile with Mr. Doak, on Little Limestone.  While he was there, a surveyor from that settlement came down to the Fork of the Holston and French Broad rivers to lay of lands for a company of pioneers who had recently come into this region, and were told by the surveyor, in answer to their inquiries for news from older settlements in the upper country, that young Presbyterian preacher, by the name of Samuel Carrick, had arrived at Limestone and was stopping with Mr. Doak.  When the surveyor was ready to return to his home, those new settlers sent an invitation to Mr. Carrick to come down and notified him that they had made an appointment for him to preach on a certain Sunday, on an Indian mound in the Fork.  Mr. Carrick made the journey and was punctually at the time and place designated.

In the Providence of God, Rev. Hezekiah Balch also arrived in the neighborhood, glad no doubt to meet a brother minister in the wilderness. They met on the mound in the Fork at the hour of service.  Mr. Carrick gave the precedence to Mr. Balch as his senior in age and office.  Each had chosen the same text, viz.:  "Now then, we are ambassadors for Christ as though God did beseech you by us:  we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye reconciled to God" (2 Corinthians 5:20).  In a note from the late Dr. J. G. M. Ramsey, written to me in July, 1876, he says that he always understood that this was the text upon which Mr. Balch and Mr. Carrick preached that day, and it is also given by Reverend Mr. Alexander in his Sketches of the Synod of Tennessee.  The meeting was continued several days, and some parents had their children baptized.  Mr. Carrick located on a farm four miles northeast of Knoxville, on the Holston River and two miles above the Fork.  His residence stood on the site now occupied by the summer residence of Mrs. Isabella Boyd, at the west end of the county bridge over the Holson River, near the point formerly known as Boyd's Ferry.

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