Nashville History Corner

John Dillahunty, founder of the Richland Creek Baptist Church

BY RIDLEY WILLS II

This is a name that does not ring many bells for people. Dillahunty was, however, an important figure in the early history of the Baptist Church in Middle Tennessee. A church he founded in 1796 was the first Baptist church west of the Appalachian Mountains and south of the Cumberland River. It was the Richland Creek Baptist Church located mostly at what is today the backyard of the house at 1106 Nichol Lane in Belle Meade. The stream for which the church was named flows a short distance east. Immediately beyond the creek is the Belle Meade Country Club golf course.

The Richland Creek Baptist Church was a log structure beside which was a small cemetery that once held as many as eleven graves, one of which was the grave of John Dillahunty, who died Feb. 8, 1816, when he was 88. Beside him was buried his wife, Hannah, who also died in 1816. Also buried there was their granddaughter, Sally Becton Dillahunty, who was accidentally killed by her father, Thomas, on a hunting expedition.

Hannah and John Dillahunty had nine children — five sons and four daughters, all of whom lived to become adults. A successor pastor, the Rev. Jesse Cox, when he was 85 years-old, remembered John Dillahunty as “a man of small stature, and, being old, quite feeble. He was not an orator, but sound in the faith, of unblemished character and commanded large congregations. He preached once a month for eight years.”

John Dillahunty was also involved with the Mill Creek Baptist Church, the second Baptist Church south of the Cumberland River. It was established in 1797 and provided the “seed” from which the First Baptist Church Nashville evolved on July 22, 1820. On June 15, 1806, Dillahunty was elected moderator of the Mill Creek Church, which was in what is today the Glencliff area of Nashville some eight miles from downtown.

When John Dillahunty died in 1816, he was succeeded by Elder Joel Anderson as pastor. Anderson moved the church one or two miles to the west and changed its name to Providence Church. No records survive of the Richland Creek Church.

John Dillahunty’s tombstone was still in the Richland Creek Church Cemetery when I was a boy in the 1940s. I once rode over to the cemetery on my bicycle and remember seeing several tombstones. A decade earlier, a 1931 Col. Dames compilation documented the inscriptions on seven tombstones there.

A Dillahunty descendant, Robert Lyles Williams, with whom I’ve corresponded irregularly for more than 25 years, has been able to trace the tombstones only so far. He concluded that the tombstones were removed from the original site soon after World War II and that, in 1950, they were in a Dillahunty Chapel at Midstate Baptist Hospital. Another descendant visited the hospital in June 1982 where he or she found the chapel but it did not carry the Dillahunty name. The tombstones were not there either.

Robert Williams made a last try in June 1999 when he visited the hospital. Hospital authorities, with whom he talked, had no idea what happened to the tombstones.

In March 2003, Nick Fielder, Tennessee State Archaeologist, visited the cemetery and verified by probe the presence of graves at the Nichol Lane location. In 2013, a survey conducted for the City of Belle Meade determined that the Dillahunty Cemetery was approximately 50 feet by 50 feet with eleven probable grave locations.

I’ve always heard that, early in the 19th century and perhaps before, there was an agreement between the Baptists and the Presbyterians that the former would establish churches in the country and that the Presbyterians would do so in the towns. My great great great grandmother, Sarah (Mrs. Randal) McGavock, was a member of Nashville’s First Presbyterian Church in 1817.