Marion County GAGenWeb - Mahalia Chapel 1909

Marion County

Mahalia Chapel AME Church in 1909

Marion County GAGenWeb

a proud part of

Trish Elliott-Kashima, County Coordinator

At last year’s Homecoming, I presented the historical background and documented evidence of the beginning of Mahalia Chapel as AME Church missionaries implanted the denomination in Reconstruction Georgia. I posited the likely inception of Mahalia as between 1866 and 1870. Those remarks can be seen online at:

In December 1909, stewards of the church : Jonas Butt, Clem Terry, James Johnson, Rufus Maddux, George Hardage, Harry Williams, Calvin Johnson, Clem Minter, and Cutts

Ellison took title to one acre of land at the present location that was purchased from W.E. Butt. It is not known whether a building already existed on the land; no mention of one

is made in the indenture, which is reproduced at the end of this paper. So a church was probably built soon after the land purchase.

In this paper, I report essential biographical data on the parties to the land sale gleaned from the US Census of April 1910, earlier censuses going back to that of 1870—the first one

after Emancipation, the Slave Schedules of 1850 and 1860 for Marion County, and various other recorded genealogical sources for Marion County.

The seller—William Elbert Butt (1868-1922)—was the son of William B. Butt and Mahala Harvey Butt. Mahalia Chapel was obviously named for the mother of the seller.

The church began around the time of his birth in 1868. He was the grandson of William B. Butt and Elisabeth Butt, large landowners and slaveholders in the fertile Kinchafoonee

Creek district northwest and southwest of Buena Vista. In 1850 the couple owned 30 slaves; in 1860 they had 27. The 1860 Slave Schedule shows the color of each slave; about

a third of the Butt slaves were classified as mulattoes, indicating racial mixing or miscegenation. Some of the early members of Mahalia Chapel appear to have been freed slaves

from the Butt plantation. The church was founded on and enabled by unacknowledged, unspoken ties of interracial kinship between freed slaves and their former owners, as

well as kinship and marriage ties among the emancipated slaves. These ties and relationships persisted for decades after the end of the Civil War in 1865, and were still strong in

1909 when W.E. Butt sold the acre of land to the stewards for the helpful, below-market price of one dollar. In 1900 and years prior, he was Ordinary, an office now named

View of Mahalia Chapel built ca 1910, before it was demolished in 2001 and replaced with a new church which was being built to the right

Mahalia Steward Jonas Butt (born around 1869) was the son of Manerva Mathis Hartage (circa 1851-1927) and an undetermined member of the Butt family with whom she had

another son named Bris or Brister. It is unclear if she married the Mr. Butt. When Manerva married Webster Hartage (circa 1851-1887) around 1872, Bris came with her and took

the surname Hartage while Jonas apparently grew up with the Butts. Thus, Jonas Butts and Steward George Hartage (1873-1953), who spelled his name with a t instead of the traditional d used by area whites, were half brothers. George Hartage was my grandfather and Jonas Butt was my uncle. The two lived close to each other in Marion and Schley Counties until the 1920s, when Jonas and his wife Fannie Brown Butts moved to rural Sumter County south of Americus. Jonas and Fannie had 18 children. George Hartage

married Laura Jane Battle (1878-1962) in 1896, and they had 12 children. By the 1920s he had been ordained a minister in the AME Church. In 1925, he and the Shipp brothers organized a new church at Good Hope, between Doyle and Putnam. Named Union Hill AME at first, then Samuel Chapel AME after the father of the Shipp brothers, the new

church was placed on a newly created Doyle Circuit with Mahalia Chapel. Rev. George Washington (or Webster?) Hartage pastored the Doyle Circuit for many years. Manerva

Mathis-Butts Hartage, and George and Laura Battle Hartage are buried in Mahalia Chapel Cemetery.

In 1900 Mahalia Church Steward Clem Terry was living quite near the church because one of his neighbors, according to the census of that year, was a member of the white

Hogg family, whose ancestral lands were located on what are now Hogg, Fouche, Barwick, and Mahalia Chapel Roads. Clem Terry was 28 and had been married to his wife Nelly

24 for five years. They had two daughters Nattie 3 and Leonora 2, and a niece Carry 6 in their household. Similarly, James Johnson 28 lived very near the church in 1910 with his

wife Mary 21 and daughters Pecolia 2 and Billa 8 months. Euclidus Hogg 38, his wife and six children were white neighbors nearby. One Augustus Terry, no doubt a kinsman of

Clem Terry, lived next door to James Johnson. Steward Rufus Maddux was enumerated in the Doyle district in 1900. He was 23 and his wife Martha was 20. Two of his younger brothers: Luther and Albert, and a younger sister Hattie Maddux were living with them. Harry Williams was the son of Ellid and Hollin Williams, residents of Buena Vista or its

environs in 1900. He was 18 at the time. He died in Marion County in April 1981 at age 96, according to the US Social Security Death Index.

Steward Calvin Johnson is something of a genealogical mystery. I have been unable to discover any data on him. I presume he was somehow related to James Johnson. In the

census of 1910, Stewards Clem Minter and Cutts Elison are shown to be close neighbors in or around Buena Vista. Clem is 59 as is his wife Mary. They have been married 40

years, have had 11 children of which 10 are alive. Four of the children are still in the nest. Clem and the children were classified as mulatto; only Mary was recorded as black.

Cutts Ellison 36 and wife Latitia 35 have been married 15 years and have had three children, two of which are alive. Some nieces are also living in their household. The entire