Photograph from the Steve Bailey Collection the only known image of the Indian Creek Church.

Crouse Baptist Church began as Indian Creek Church in the early 1900s in the Indian Creek mill village. The village centered on the Indian Creek Manufacturing Company, later known as Trio Mill. A 1922 newspaper account of local mills noted that operatives generally had comfortable homes with garden plots, along with schools and churches provided as part of the typical mill-village arrangement. Indian Creek Church was part of that community life.

By the early 1950s the mill had been purchased by Jerry W. Walker, his wife Elizabeth, and George B. Mason and renamed Trio Mill. It ran three shifts, employed about thirty people, and produced yarn. In March 1954 The Lincoln Times reported that Lithium Corporation of America had crews drilling nearby on a twenty-four-hour schedule for lithium ore deposits. The company had acquired or optioned roughly two thousand acres in the Cleveland, Gaston, and Lincoln County area, described at the time as the largest single lithium ore reserve then known.

Operations focused on the Laboratory, Indian Creek, Crouse area. Plans called for most homes in the Trio Mill village to be dismantled and moved about a mile and a half to other company owned property along a hard surfaced road, then rebuilt as modern three to five room houses.

On August 12, 1954, The Lincoln Times-News carried a front-page story titled “Atomic Age to Change Map of Lincoln County In Year.” It reported that one of Lincoln County’s mill villages soon would be literally wiped off the map. The atomic age had caught up with the Indian Creek mill community. Within a year the bulldozers would make a gaping hole where the scattered huts then stood in the quest for lithium. Indian Creek would be but the first of what would include other points on the map of the Piedmont. The people of Indian Creek knew little and cared less about the site being over the world’s newest and richest lithium beds, or that this

lithium was vital to the hydrogen bomb’s production. To the remaining residents, it meant simply that they had to move on to other places where they might use their skills on cotton looms in other mills. The article described the start of a quest for ore that would ultimately see huge areas of Lincoln and Gaston Counties gashed apart, shoved aside, and piled up in gigantic heaps, sure to make the section lose its rolling appearance and give an appearance of choppy hills. The atomic age was going to be seen there even if it fortunately had not been felt.

USGS records confirm that Lithium Corporation of America opened and operated a lithium mine at the Indian Creek Deposit in Lincoln County, with first production in 1955. A large stockpile of ore remained at the site in 1967, though active mining had stopped by then. The existence of the mine has also been verified locally by members of the Carpenter Family who have lived in the area for generations and who as children rode bikes around the strip mine.

The church was among the community institutions affected by the change. In the mid1950s, when lithium mining plans led Lithium Corporation of America to acquire the Indian Creek mill village, most of the company homes were scheduled to be dismantled and moved about a mile and a half to other company-owned property along a hard-surfaced road, then rebuilt. The church congregation, however, chose a different path. The men of the church built a new building in Crouse and renamed the congregation Crouse Baptist Church. Only a few items were salvaged from the old church and carried to the new site: a piano, some lights, and the bell that hangs in the steeple today. The lights are located in the current educational building, and the piano in the choir room. They are the only things brought from the original building.

The relocation placed the congregation in the village where other churches already stood. Crouse Baptist Church remains an active Southern Baptist congregation in the South Fork Baptist Association, located at 2764 Saint Marks Church Road. Its cemetery holds burials dating back to at least the mid-twentieth century. No detailed association minutes or deed records confirming every step of the move have surfaced in the materials available for this installment, and most of those who could have filled in the gaps are gone. What the surviving notes and the single photograph preserve is the outline of a mill village congregation that moved to Crouse, and a new building was built by its own members under a new name.

The passion found in that 1954 article mirrors the passion found today, over 70 years later, around the possibility of a new lithium mine in the area. As Piedmont Lithium began core sampling about ten years ago and started buying up Indian Creek property, heated local conversation has again turned to what will happen to the land.

Crouse Baptist Church

The story of Crouse Baptist Church is therefore a story of continuity by relocation. The congregation that once worshipped in the Indian Creek mill village continued in the building the men of the church raised in Crouse. The bell that once rang at Indian Creek Church hangs in the Crouse Baptist Church steeple and rings every Sunday as it has rang for over one hundred years, the piano, and lights that were carried from the old building remain in use. In a community whose other churches have been traced through newspaper notices, cemetery records, and oral memory, Crouse Baptist Church stands as the one whose origins are tied most directly to the mill village that lithium mining ended in the mid-1950s.

Sources

·       Personal notes from members of Crouse Baptist Church, preserved by the Crouse Community History & Photo Project.

·       Photograph of Indian Creek Church, Steve Bailey Collection.

·       The Lincoln Times, March 18, 1954, “Drills Humming At Indian Creek; Plan To Move Mill Village Homes.”

·       The Lincoln Times-News, August 12, 1954, “Atomic Age to Change Map of Lincoln County In Year.” USGS records on the Indian Creek Deposit lithium mine.

·       Contextual notes on Indian Creek Manufacturing Company / Trio Mill and Lithium Corporation of America activity compiled for the Crouse Community History & Photo Project.