Saturday, October 18, 2014
Staff report
YOUNGSTOWN
This weekend marks the 140th anniversary of Third Baptist Church.
The congregation, under the leadership of Rev. Dr. Morris W. Lee, DD, is the oldest African American Baptist congregation in the city, having been organized in 1874.
The occasion will be marked Sunday at 10:30 a.m. by a gathering of about 100 descendants of the founder of the church, Rev. Pleasant Tucker.
Rev. Tucker and his wife, Eliza Jane, arrived in Youngstown while blacks were leaving the South after the Civil War, hoping to carve out a better life after the end of slavery.
Tucker and others left Virginia and moved north and east, with some putting down roots in communities along the route they traveled.
According to the church’s history, a group stopped in Youngstown and were made to feel welcome by Anne Rice and stayed.
After organizing, they met in the township hall, a section of the First Baptist Church in the downtown, until acquiring their first building on Mill Street, which is now Mahoning Avenue.
Throughout the decades that followed, descendants of the Tuckers’ eight daughters have gone on to leave their mark in the Mahoning Valley and across the country in a variety of occupations.
The reunion will include direct Tucker descendants and several associated families.
Through the use of genealogy and DNA testing, a connection has been made with various descendants of Florence Tucker White Howard Lee, who was one of the early leaders of the old Sharonline Mother’s Club, which served to improve the quality of life for residents living in that section of the East Side dating back to the early 1920s.
During the course of the weekend, the family will tour cemeteries associated with their ancestors, gather for a banquet and worship with the congregation of Third Baptist Church.
This evening there will be a special presentation to the family from Ohio Genealogical Society officials.
Margaret Cheney, president and First Families of Ohio Lineage Chairwoman, and Marleen Applegate, Century Family of Ohio Lineage chairwoman and Fellows and Awards chairwoman, will be on hand to make the presentation.
Stacey Adger, a great-great-granddaughter of the Tuckers, was recently appointed OGS Trustee of the Youngstown area.
Through ongoing research, it has been confirmed that Rev. Tucker was instrumental in the creation of the Allegheny Baptist Association, which included African-American clergy in eastern Ohio and western Pennsylvania, dating back to 1891, and was involved in several earlier associations.
He pastored Third Baptist and an earlier Union Baptist congregation (not affiliated with the current church on Lincoln Avenue), which lasted until 1896.
Documentation also has placed him in Brazil, Ind., and the creation of Second Baptist Church, which is still in operation, along with Baptist churches in Cleveland and Butler, Pa., and New Castle, Pa.