Mitchell County  Georgia Bios   William Lewis Curry

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Laura Stotler   Lstotler@aol.com


Table of Contents page: http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/crawford.htm
Georgia Table of Contents: http://www.usgwarchives.net/ga/gafiles.htm


Source:  History of the Baptist Denomination in Georgia:
With Biographical Compendium and Portrait Gallery of
Baptist Ministers and Other Georgia Baptists compiled for
the Christian Index. Atlanta, Georgia: Jas. P. Harrison &
Co., Printers and Publishers, 1881, p. 164 

William Lewis Curry

While a minister, about thirty-five years of age, of
prepossessing appearance, was once earnestly delivering
the Gospel message to his pastoral charge at Evergreen
church, in Mitchell county, Georgia, a note was handed
him.  He read it, and then proceeded with his discourse
until it was finished.  The note announced the sudden
death of his father, whom, the day before, he had left in
good health in the adjoining county of Baker.  The
preacher's name was W. L. Curry, by birth a South
Carolinian, who made Georgia his home by adoption, at the
close of our late civil war.  A graduate of Furman
University, an attendant, during three years, of the
Presbyterian Theological Seminary at Columbia, South
Carolina, and during two years, of the Baptist
Theological Seminary at Greenville, South Carolina, he
has had a fine education, and, after the war, settled in
Dougherty county, Georgia, where he preached and taught
school.  He afterwards moved to Baker county, and was
called to take charge of the Baptist church at Milford,
which he has served ever since, except one year spent in
Randolph county.  He preached one year for the Blakely
church, two for the Morgan church, three for the
Evergreen church, and also served the Notchaway church,
of which he is still pastor.  About five feet ten inches
high, he is a man of slight build, with light hair, blue
eyes, a florid complexion and weighs 130 or 135 pounds.
You can see energy and fixedness of purpose in his
appearance, while depth of piety and earnestness of
spirit, and devotion to his calling, impress themselves
upon you, after forming his acquaintance.  He is now
forty-four years old, having been born December 20th,
1836, in Edgefield district, South Carolina, his parents
being Joel and Elizabeth Curry.  In his sixteenth year he
professed religion, and joined the Big Stephens Creek
church, South Carolina.  In 1860 he was ordained, I. L.
Brooks, E. T. Whatley, Dr. Richard Furman and D. D.
Brunson constituting the presbytery.  For a time he
preached for the Old Pendleton church, Pickens district,
South Carolina, after which he established his first
pastoral relations with the Abbeville Baptist church,
which he was serving when the war between the States
began in 1861.  The year previous, in 1860, he became
deeply impressed with the conviction that it was his duty
to labor in the foreign field as a missionary, and
offered himself to our Foreign Mission Board.  Upon
invitation, he repaired to Richmond, Virginia, and
submitted to a preliminary examination, which was
thorough and satisfactory, but he was pronounced by the
examining surgeon, in the employ of the Board, physically
unfitted for missionary work in a foreign field, and was
consequently rejected.  It was during this visit to
Richmond that he met her who was destined to become his
life-partner, Miss Emily E. Toy, of Norfolk, Virginia,
daughter of Deacon Thomas D. Toy, and sister of Dr. C. H.
Toy, late Professor in the Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary.  He was married May 2d, 1861.

Then sounded the tocsin of war!  As a private he joined a
company in the fifteenth South Carolina regiment and was
at Charleston and heard the first gun of the war fired,
at half-past four o'clock on the morning of the 12th of
April, 1861.  He was, however, soon after and without
solicitation on his part, appointed chaplain of a
regiment of Semme's Georgia brigade, an office he filled
for three years; and, as there was no other chaplain in
the command for a great part of the time, he was really
chaplain for the entire brigade, rather than for his own
regiment.  As a chaplain, he was faithful, and during the
three years of his service baptized more persons that
during all the rest of his life, before and since.

It was a remarkable providence which led him, after the
war, to settle in southwestern Georgia, among the
survivors of the very brigade with which he had labored
so much during the war, without in the slightest degree
anticipating the reunion when he came to the State.
There, among his old companions in arms, and among the
many new friends he has made, he labors as a minister,
without reproach, among white and colored alike, standing
high in the community both as a man and a neighbor.

Gifted with a large share of common sense and tact,
supplemented by a liberal education and personal piety,
with earnestness and pathos in the pulpit, devotion to
his flock and a remarkable caution with regard to the
reception of candidates for baptism, he is well prepared
for the sphere he now fills.

There are more attractive orators, and men who add more
members to a church, yet, when we consider the melting
pathos of his sermons, and the undoubted genuineness of
the conversation professed by those who have joined his
churches, in true success as a preacher and pastor, he
may be rated as high as those who enjoy more reputation
for eloquence and oratory.

He is fond of books, and has a fine private library, but,
owning to indigestion superinduced by hard study when
young, and the cares incident to having a large family of
children, besides the necessity, at times, of personally
overlooking his farming interests, he has not been able
to adopt those habits of study to which his predilections
incline him.  Nevertheless, in addition to his regular
educational training, he has been able to secure a good
stock of historical knowledge, both sacred and profane.
He is still a growing man, and the sun of his influence
and usefulness has hardly yet reached its zenith.

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