This event has been rescheduled from Jan. 30 to Feb. 27.
| 11 a.m. Feb. 27 East Texas Research Center Steen Library, second floor SFA campus |
| Old North Baptist Church records dating back to Texas Republic days will be donated to the East Texas Research Center at Stephen F. Austin State University at 11 a.m. Friday, Feb. 27, in the center. Located four miles north of the Nacogdoches city limits on U.S. 59, the church was founded in 1838 and is the oldest active Missionary Baptist church in Texas. The Summers family joined the church soon after their arrival in Nacogdoches in 1851. Four members of that family — Jesse Summers Sr., Jesse Summers Jr., Sallie T. Summers and Dr. Tom Middlebrook, Sallie’s great-nephew — guarded the set of records for more than 130 years. The church elders first entrusted the documents to Jesse Summers Sr. in the 1890s with the direction to keep them safe from the Primitive Baptists after they and the Missionary Baptists at the church parted ways. The records include the church’s theology, covenant, membership and disciplinary actions from the 1830s through the 1870s. They also contain the founding minutes of the church from 1838, when Texas was still a republic, making the set of records the oldest document from the oldest church in the oldest town in Texas. Middlebrook, who earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees from SFA before his Doctor of Medicine from The University of Texas Southwestern Medical School in Dallas, was a child and adolescent psychiatrist as well as an avid historian and archeologist in Nacogdoches. Before his death in 2024, Middlebrook directed his daughter, Hollis, to donate the Old North Baptist Church records to ETRC. For more information, contact Kyle Ainsworth, ETRC special collections librarian, at asketrc@sfasu.edu or (936) 468-1590. |