ALABAMA HERITAGE
  • Magazine
    • Current and Back Issues >
      • Back Issues 141-150 >
        • Issue 147, Winter 2023
        • Issue 146, Fall 2022
        • Issue 145, Summer 2022
        • Issue 144, Spring 2022
        • Issue 143, Winter 2022
        • Issue 142, Fall 2021
        • Issue 141, Summer 2021
      • Back Issues 131-140 >
        • Issue 140, Spring 2021
        • Issue 139, Winter 2021
        • Issue 138, Fall 2020
        • Issue 137, Summer 2020
        • Issue 136, Spring 2020
        • Issue 135, Winter 2020
        • Issue 134, Fall 2019
        • Issue 133, Summer 2019
        • Issue 132 Spring 2019
        • Issue 131, Winter 2019
      • Back Issues 121-130 >
        • Issue 130, Fall 2018
        • Issue 129, Summer 2018
        • Issue 128, Spring 2018
        • Issue 127, Winter 2018
        • Issue 126, Fall 2017
        • Issue 125 Summer 2017
        • Issue 124, Spring 2017
        • Issue 123, Winter 2017
        • Issue 122, Fall 2016
        • Issue 121, Summer 2016
      • Back Issues 111-120 >
        • Issue 120, Spring 2016
        • Issue 119, Winter 2016
        • Issue 118, Fall 2015
        • Issue 117, Summer 2015
        • Issue 116, Spring 2015
        • Issue 115, Winter 2015
        • Issue 114, Fall 2014
        • Issue 113, Summer 2014
        • Issue 112, Spring 2014
        • Issue 111, Winter 2014
      • Back Issues 101-110 >
        • Issue 110, Fall 2013
        • Issue 109, Summer 2013
        • Issue 108, Spring 2013
        • Issue 107, Winter 2013
        • Issue 106, Fall 2012
        • Issue 105, Summer 2012
        • Issue 104, Spring 2012
        • Issue 103, Winter 2012
        • Issue 102, Fall 2011
        • Issue 101, Summer 2011
      • Back Issues 91-100 >
        • Issue 100, Spring 2011
        • Issue 99, Winter 2011
        • Issue 98, Fall 2010
        • Issue 97, Summer 2010
        • Issue 96, Spring 2010
        • Issue 95, Winter 2010
        • Issue 94, Fall 2009
        • Issue 93, Summer 2009
        • Issue 92, Spring 2009
        • Issue 91, Winter 2009
      • Back Issues 81-90 >
        • Issue 90, Fall 2008
        • Issue 89, Summer 2008
        • Issue 88, Spring 2008
        • Issue 87, Winter 2008
        • Issue 86, Fall 2007
        • Issue 85, Summer 2007
        • Issue 84, Spring 2007
        • Issue 83, Winter 2007
        • Issue 82, Fall 2006
        • Issue 81, Summer 2006
      • Back Issues 71-80 >
        • Issue 80, Spring 2006
        • Issue 79, Winter 2006
        • Issue 78, Fall 2005
        • Issue 77, Summer 2005
        • Issue 76, Spring 2005
        • Issue 75, Winter 2005
        • Issue 74, Fall 2004
        • Issue 73, Summer 2004
        • Issue 72, Spring 2004
        • Issue 71, Winter 2004
      • Back Issues 61-70 >
        • Issue 70, Fall 2003
        • Issue 69, Summer 2003
        • Issue 68, Spring 2003
        • Issue 67, Winter 2003
        • Issue 66, Fall 2002
        • Issue 65, Summer 2002
        • Issue 64, Spring 2002
        • Issue 63, Winter 2002
        • Issue 62, Fall 2001
        • Issue 61, Summer 2001
      • Back Issues 51-60 >
        • Issue 60, Spring 2001
        • Issue 59, Winter 2001
        • Issue 58, Fall 2000
        • Issue 57, Summer 2000
        • Issue 56, Spring 2000
        • Issue 55, Winter 2000
        • Issue 54, Fall 1999
        • Issue 53, Summer 1999
        • Issue 52, Spring 1999
        • Issue 51, Winter 1999
      • Back Issues 41-50 >
        • Issue 50, Fall 1998
        • Issue 49, Summer 1998
        • Issue 48, Spring 1998
        • Issue 47, Winter 1998
        • Issue 46, Fall 1997
        • Issue 45, Summer 1997
        • Issue 44, Spring 1997
        • Issue 43, Winter 1997
        • Issue 42, Fall 1996
        • Issue 41, Summer 1996
      • Back Issues 31-40 >
        • Issue 40, Spring 1996
        • Issue 39, Winter 1996
        • Issue 38, Fall 1995
        • Issue 37, Summer 1995
        • Issue 36, Spring 1995
        • Issue 35, Winter 1995
        • Issue 34, Fall 1994
        • Issue 33, Summer 1994
        • Issue 32, Spring 1994
        • Issue 31, Winter 1994
      • Back Issues 21-30 >
        • Issue 30, Fall 1993
        • Issue 29, Summer 1993
        • Issue 28, Spring 1993
        • Issue 27, Winter 1993
        • Issue 26, Fall 1992
        • Issue 25, Summer 1992
        • Issue 24, Spring 1992
        • Issue 23, Winter 1992
        • Issue 22, Fall 1991
        • Issue 21, Summer 1991
      • Back Issues 11-20 >
        • Issue 20, Spring 1991
        • Issue 19, Winter 1991
        • Issue 18, Fall 1990
        • Issue 17, Summer 1990
        • Issue 16, Spring 1990
        • Issue 15, Winter 1990
        • Issue 14, Fall 1989
        • Issue 13, Summer 1989
        • Issue 12, Spring 1989
        • Issue 11, Winter 1989
      • Back Issues 1-10 >
        • Issue 10, Fall 1988
        • Issue 9, Summer 1988
        • Issue 8, Spring 1988
        • Issue 7, Winter 1988
        • Issue 6, Fall 1987
        • Issue 5, Summer 1987
        • Issue 4, Spring 1987
        • Issue 3, Winter 1987
        • Issue 2, Fall 1986
        • Issue 1, Summer 1986
    • Digital Features
    • Links of Interest
    • Bonus Materials >
      • Adventures in Genealogy
      • Alabama Heritage Blog
      • Alabama Territory
      • Becoming Alabama >
        • Creek War Era
        • Civil War Era
        • Civil Rights Movement
      • From the Vault
      • History in Ruins
      • Places in Peril
      • Recipes
  • Online Store
    • Customer Service
  • About Us
    • Awards
    • Meet Our Team
    • News
    • Writer's Guidelines and Submissions
  • Search
  • Donate
Published by The University of Alabama,
The University of Alabama at Birmingham,
and the Alabama Department of Archives and History

A Visionary Outreach: The Episcopal Church’s Mission to the Poarch Creek Indians  

10/1/2013

 
Rev Edgar Edwards Poarch Creek Indians
Rev. Edgar Edwards baptizes members of the Poarch Creek band in the 1930s. (Birmingham Public Library)
​By almost any standard, the Poarch Band of Creek Indians is successful. It operates three casinos in southern Alabama and gives generously to schools and other institutions in the area, donating more than two million dollars to schools in Escambia, Baldwin, and Monroe Counties in February 2013 alone. Less than ninety years ago, however, those same schools excluded the Poarch Creeks, and one woman visiting among the Poarch Creek people described their homes as “fly and mosquito-infested” and “alive with hookworms,” with families “thickly housed, often two, three, four beds in a little room.” The economic success and cultural renaissance of the Poarch Creeks is due in large part to its members’ indomitable will to survive, but it owes much as well to a small-town Episcopal priest, a pair of missionaries, and one visionary bishop. 
Chief Fred Walker of the Poarch Creek bandPictureChief Fred Walker of the Poarch Creek band was the first leader to give his approval to the Episcopal church’s mission. Soon after, a church, which also served as a school, was built. (Birmingham Public Library)
In 1930 William George McDowell, bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Alabama, observed that his entire diocese had “been affected by the prevailing financial depression,” but he also noted that it had undertaken several new initiatives, including work among the Poarch Band of Creek Indians. A remnant of the once numerous tribe forcibly evicted by the American government in the early nineteenth century, the Poarch Creeks had received a small allotment of land at the headwaters of Perdido Creek near Atmore, and Bishop McDowell asked Atmore’s Episcopal priest, Edgar Edwards, to look into their circumstances. Joining Edwards at McDowell’s request were Robert Macy, a medical doctor, and his wife Anna, both of whom had previously served as missionaries in Mexico.
 
Edwards and the Macys faced challenging conditions when they began their work among the Creeks. Edwards saw issues like illegitimacy and prostitution among the Creeks as especially problematic, and when he began holding services at a local Indian school, no one attended. But he also believed that the Creeks’ difficulties were owed at least in part to the way their white neighbors treated them. As he observed soon after starting his visits, “[S]ince the Church has undertaken work among these people, much injustice, forced immorality, and other evils have been exposed, and because of this, there seems to be a quiet movement to [scatter the] Indians, by making them move from where they have worked many years. This means that where ever they go, they become…body chattels for white men.”
 
Soon, however, Edwards and the Macys found a receptive audience among the Indian population. The medical care provided by Robert Macy—treating pellagra, scabies, hookworm, and similar ailments—did much to establish the credibility of the Episcopal Church outreach. Attendance at Edwards’s church services started to increase once he consulted and received the approval of Fred Walker, a leader of the Creek community, and in short order Edwards and members of the Poarch Creeks built a church that also functioned as a school for Creek children, who were excluded from white schools and would not attend black schools. 

​Robert Macy died less than two years after coming to Atmore, but Edwards and Anna Macy continued to work and build relationships among the Creeks after he passed away. As Roberta McGhee Sells, a Poarch Band elder, recalled, “[E]verybody was so hungry… for religion. And these people were really loving people. So the Indians got real close to them.” Indeed, after completing their first church, St. John’s in the Wilderness, early in 1932, the Creeks built another just a few months later and named it St. Anna’s, in part for the Biblical prophetess but also to honor Anna Macy.

​Baptisms took place in a stream near St. Anna’s, a spot Anna Macy described as “a beautiful pool…with natural terraces on the side…surrounded by trees creeping down to the waters [sic] edge.” The first among the Creeks to be baptized was “Chief” Aleck Rolin, who was in his nineties and only days from death. Numerous others followed his lead, with Anna Macy reporting sixteen baptisms in the spring of 1932 and Bishop McDowell confirming twenty-six more during his visit later that year.

The first among the Creeks to be baptized was “Chief” Aleck Rolin, who was in his nineties and only days from death. ​
The mission to the Poarch Creeks, and other initiatives begun around the same time, represented a new approach to social service by the Episcopal Church in Alabama. Previously, most outreach had been done by parishes or individuals, but Bishop McDowell—a progressive man who praised Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal for the ways its “experiments in social welfare” raised “our hopes…anew to dream of new heavens and a new earth in which dwelleth righteousness”—brought together the diocese as a whole to address human need. McDowell and others also displayed a new awareness of the church’s responsibility to serve marginalized communities. In addition to the mission among the Poarch Creeks, for example, McDowell initiated a ministry to the poor whites of Sand Mountain, a settlement house led for many years by Augusta Bening Martin and known as the House of Happiness. The Episcopal priest in Selma, Edward Gamble, lobbied the Works Progress Administration for funds to build a community center for African Americans in his city.
 
By 1944 George C. Merkel, who succeeded Edwards as the Episcopal priest in Atmore, could report that the mission among the Creeks included not only two churches but also “a four-room public school, a building to feed the children their noon-day meal, and a caretaker’s home.” All told, the mission had “a group of about 15 young High School [children], and about the same number of elementary school children, as well as about six or ten of kindergarten age” and “three teachers, kindergarten, elementary and High School, about 35 children in all.” Contributions from Episcopal women’s groups, meanwhile, made it possible for outstanding young people from the Poarch Creeks to attend schools such as St. Mary’s School, Sewanee, and the Patterson School in Lenoir, North Carolina.
 
With the help of the Episcopal Church, the Poarch Creeks developed a new sense of their history and a deeper awareness of themselves as a people. As Roberta McGhee Sells put it, Episcopalians did “a lot for the Indian folks…. They helped them get where they could go to school. …The whites didn’t want the Indians to get an education ‘cause they didn’t want them to know what they had done to them. If the Episcopal people hadn’t come, I don’t know how long this community would have lasted.” When on August 11, 1984, the United States government made the Poarch Band of Creek Indians the only federally recognized tribe in Alabama, the records of St. Anna’s Episcopal Church were primary sources of genealogical information that confirmed individual membership in the tribe.
 
In 2009 the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Schori, visited St. Anna’s, and its members told her the story of the Macys, Edwards, and Merkel, and of the difference that the Episcopal Church had made in their history. Tears running down her cheeks, Bishop Jefferts Schori accepted a handmade quilt from the people of St. Anna’s as they told her: “The Episcopal Church saved us as a people. Thank you for coming to us.” 

Author

J. Barry Vaughn, an Alabama native, has served Episcopal churches in Alabama, California, and Pennsylvania, and he is presently rector of Christ Church Episcopal in Las Vegas, Nevada. The University of Alabama Press will publish his book, Bishops, Bourbons, and Big Mules: A History of the Episcopal Church in Alabama, later this year. He is grateful to Rev. S. Albert Kennington of Fairhope, Alabama, and the late Lee Martin of Atmore, Alabama, for their assistance in researching and writing this article. Joshua D. Rothman, standing editor of the “Southern Religion” department of Alabama Heritage, is professor of history at the University of Alabama and director of the university’s Frances S. Summersell Center for the Study of the South, which sponsors this department.
​


This article was originally published in Issue #110, Spring 2013.
Subscribe to Alabama Heritage
Earl Gregg Swem III
8/18/2016 01:09:38 am

I've never thought of Episcopalians as big on the missionary scene but this work with the Poarch Creek is notable.


Comments are closed.

    From the Vault

    Read complete classic articles and departments featured in Alabama Heritage magazine in the past 35 years of publishing. You'll find in-depth features along with quirky and fun departments that cover the people, places, and events that make our state great!

    Read More From the Vault

    Archives

    February 2023
    January 2023
    August 2022
    June 2022
    February 2022
    June 2021
    May 2021
    July 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    April 2015
    July 2014
    April 2014
    October 2013
    October 2012
    July 2012
    October 2009

    Categories

    All
    African Americans
    Agriculture
    Alabama
    Archeaology
    Architecture
    Avondale
    Avondale Zoo
    Birmingham
    Business
    Cathedral Caverns
    Civil War
    Constitution
    Cuba
    Episcopal Church
    Food
    Guntersville
    Hollywood
    Hunting
    Murder
    Mystery
    National Guard
    Native American
    Nursing
    Photography
    Poarch Creek Indians
    Politics
    Preservation
    Quilts
    Religion
    Revolutionary War
    Sand Mountain
    Whiskey
    Women
    WWI
    WWII

    RSS Feed

Online Store
​Customer Service
Meet Our Team
Board of Directors
Corporate Sponsors
News
Join Our Email List

Employment
UA Disclaimer
UA Privacy Policy ​
​Website comments or questions?  

Email ah.online@ua.edu
Published by The University of Alabama, The University of Alabama at Birmingham, and the Alabama Department of Archives and History
​Alabama Heritage
Box 870342
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487
Local: (205) 348-7467
Toll-Free: (877) 925-2323
Fax: (205) 348-7473

alabama.heritage@ua.edu