First Baptist Church

The First Missionary Baptist Church of Greenville was organized in 1880 under the leadership of Rev. Parson Stewart as the neighborhood church for the black residential neighborhood on Baptist Hill. It is Greenville's earliest known black missionary Baptist congregation and the town's earliest remaining black church building.

Historically, southern black neighborhood churches played an important and wide-ranging role in fostering the development and growth of black life in the segregated community. The black church acted as a defender of public morality, supporting the principles of honesty, hard work, and marital fidelity. Because the churches were often the only major organizations actually controlled by blacks, the churches quickly became central institutions in the black communities and provided a social outlet for a people long denied outside attachments or a means of identification.

In Greenville, the result of this development produced two concentrated black neighborhoods, each with a racially and socially independent church. The organization and subsequent growth of the churches represent a local response to the exclusion of blacks from public life in Greenville. The Baptist Hill the two neighborhoods and the least disturbed by modern development or recent affluence, has historically identified with this church as the hub of its neighborhood activity. The 1908 building was the third building venture of this congregation. The earlier buildings, all of which were situated on this same site were destroyed by fires or storms. For over 80 years the church has opened its doors as the community social center, town hall and place of worship, hall and place of worship, subsequently serving as the most effective vehicle for internal social control and local reform movements. The "Mother Church" of all-black Baptist churches in Greenville, First Baptist today distinctively neighborhood as the only church building.