BIOGRAPHY: Rev. Lewis Brown – March 23, 1835 ex-slave

Happy Birthday!
REV. LEWIS BROWN
BIOGRAPHY and GENEALOGY
(1835 – aft. 1896)
Missouri and Sumter County, Alabama

Rev. Lewis Brown, of Epes, Sumter county, was born near St. Louis, Mo., March 23, 1835, and came to Alabama in his tenth year. He united with the church in 1863 and was baptized by a Mr. Edmonds into the fellowship of the Jones’ Creek Church, by which church he was called to ordination in the fall of 1868.

Married a slave girl

The chief persons in the presbytery were Revs. Abner Scarber (white) and Mr. Wright. Mr. Brown’s main pastoral charges have been Jones’ Creek, nine years; Sumterville, thirteen years; New Bethel, thirteen years; and Mount Olive, four years. He has long been moderator of the Bethlehem Association, and is known and recognized as a firm and tried friend of education and missions; and his children give evidence of pure and wise aspirations.
Mr. Brown was married to Mrs. Elizabeth Brown, a slave girl on the same plantation with himself, in 1852. Seven sons and one daughter are the fruit of the marriage.
He is a very industrious and economical man and has possession of valuable property, worth $15,000. Seven or eight hundred acres of his farm once formed part of the plantation on which he (with 500 others) worked as a slave till 1865. He says that his master, Mr. Brown, was a Christian and that after the close of the war this plantation gave to this county most of its religious leaders.

SOURCE
Excerpt from The Cyclopedia of the Colored Baptists of Alabama – Their Leaders and Their Work copyright 1896

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