Bowden Joyce, Founding Mothers

Appendix B A Church of Their Own: The Fuller Institute Story by Joyce M. Bowden and Ruth M. Collins

Elizabeth Byrd, Emily Osborn, Eliza Osborn, Louisa Jane Merriman, Caroline Rebecca Mounce, Ann Turpin, Mary Bailey and Annie Calhoun together with organizing pastor Rev. William H. Lawton, founded Greenwood Methodist Church, Greenwood, South Carolina, in 1858. Worship began in temporary quarters. In early 1859, an unlikely event opened the door to a church of the founders’ own: Albert Waller bought the Fuller Institute, a girls’ school. An original school trustee, Waller assumed the debt and other liabilities in exchange for title to the building and the land on which it stood. 1 Plans for the school had begun 13 years earlier when Baptist ministers and laymen including Waller adopted a resolution that read in part, “Whereas, It is desirable that the Baptists and as many of their friends as may feel a willingness to join them, establish at Greenwood, Abbeville District, Male and Female Academies . . . under the supervision and control of the Baptist denomination, and we will use our united and strenuous efforts to accomplish the same.” They set up committees to raise money and recruit teachers. 2 They competed for teachers with the Greenwood Association for the Promotion of Education locally and with schools in other parts of the district and in neighboring districts. The boys’ school probably operated for about the same amount of time as the girls’ school. An account of this institution is outside the scope of this work. Rev. James M. Chiles and Rev. William P. Hill, Baptist ministers, 3 led the school movement, Chiles as president and Hill as secretary of the board of 1 Abbeville District, South Carolina, Equity Court, Jane Elizabeth Waller v. Pelius A. Waller, et al., Exhibit B, 4 February 1859, Albert Waller Estate; Abbeville County Probate Court, Box 9, Pkg. 253; SCDAH microfilm AB 124, frames 137-162; South Carolina Department of Archives and History, Columbia. 2 “Mount Moriah, Sept. 17, 1846,” The Abbeville (South Carolina) Banner , 23 September 1846, online archives (https://www.newspapers.com : 2 December 2020), p. 3, col. 2. 3 Watson, Greenwood County Sketches , 189. Also, 1850 U.S. census, Abbeville District, South Carolina, population schedule, Village of Greenwood, p. 116B (stamped), dwelling 1792, family 1799, William P. Hill; digital image, Ancestry (http://www.ancestry.com : 29 November 2020); citing NARA microfilm publication M432, roll 848.

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