Church TN Knox Lebanon

Description

History of Lebanon Presbyterian Church, "In the Fork" Five Miles East of Knoxville, Tenn. http://www.knoxcotn.org/churches/lebanon/index.html

Author

by Dr. J. G. M. Ramsey

Publisher

Mecklenburg Place, Knoxville, Tenn., Sept. 26th, 1875.

Source Text

Rev. Isaac Anderson succeeded Mr. Carrick as pastor of Lebanon, about the year of 1803 or 1804 while he was yet a young man.  While he was not remarkable for culture and attainments, he was remarkable for his mental endowments, his great genius and intellectual capacity; he was a profound thinker, a thorough theologian, and an ingenious metaphysician, fond of the polemics of the pulpit, and earnest, emphatic piety.  Lebanon was under his pastorate, but unlike his predecessor he gave but half his time or services to this congregation and, the other half to Washington Church, ten miles away. ... Moses Brooks was not an Elder at the first organization of Lebanon, but, I think, became one soon after White, McNutt and Adair attached themselves to the Knoxville church; he too was of Revolutionary stock and participated in the last years of that war; I believe he was at King's Mountain, and certainly Guilford Courthouse.  He was a very well informed man, well indoctrinated and thorough Presbyterian -- strenuous in the defense of his creed and the observances and orders of the church.  For many years before his death, a physical infirmity, of chronic character, incapacitated him from an active participation in the duties of his office, but such was his love for the house of God and the services of His sanctuary that he was through the filial piety of his sons often brought down the river in a canoe and borne from it in his easy chair to the church.  His residence was a mile above Carrick's farm on the north bank of the Holston, and is still in the occupancy of his son, Gen. Joseph A. Brooks, who afterwards succeeded his father in the Eldership of Lebanon church. ... The fathers, where are they? About 1813, Rev. Mr. Anderson gave up the pastorate for a field at Maryville, more congenial to his taste and better adapted to his ambition and his great capacities than Lebanon and Washington churches offered.  In the latter, the bantling of his earlier years, Union Seminary had sent out educated sons to the South and West, but at Maryville he hoped to found a school of the prophets whose voice should reach the world.  There we shall leave him to return again to Lebanon.