The Travelling Church

The Travelling Church was a large group of pioneering settlers in the late 1700s that emigrated from Spotsylvania County, Virginia, to the Kentucky District of Virginia. It was the largest group that migrated to the area in a single movement. The group was led by the Reverend Lewis Craig, one of three pastor sons of Toliver Craig Sr., and its core was his Baptist congregation. The group of about 600 people arrived at Gilbert's Creek, Kentucky, in December 1781. Other preachers in the Travelling Church were Lewis Craig's younger brother Rev. Joseph Craig and his beloved slave Peter Durrett, who later became a pioneering black minister in Lexington, Kentucky. Lewis Craig's other brother who was a minister, Rev. Elijah Craig, did not come with the rest of the Church, as he remained for a while in Virginia to help James Madison establish constitutional religious liberty assurances before joining the group later. The group's pioneering members were to found many churches (including the first north of the Kentucky River), settlements, and other institutions that continue to this day.

Seeking religious freedom and economic opportunity, in 1781 Rev. Lewis Craig led a group numbering "perhaps five or six hundred" people known as "The Travelling Church" composed of a core comprised by a majority of the Baptist congregation of Lewis' Upper Spottsylvania church, along with other settlers joining in, to the area of Virginia known as Kentucky County.

"Leaving behind the discrimination against them by the established church in colonial Virginia, they sought fertile soil" for both physical and spiritual fruitbearing. "This hardy group...was led by the Rev. Lewis Craig, who saw his flock's trek across the mountains as parallel to that of the Israelites leaving Egypt for Canaan." During the fall-winter of 1781, Craig as Moses and Capt. William Ellis as Joshua led the huge train over the frozen and danger-filled Cumberland Gap with only a little loss of life into the rugged frontier of Kentucky for their Promised Land.

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