Qualla: Liberty Universalist Church and Feasterville Academy Historic District

Liberty Universalist Church and Feasterville Academy Historic District: Introduction

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bill Fitzpatrick, CC BY-SA 3.0. In 1772, a Baptist historian riding through the Beaver Creek country took note of a peculiar congregation: twenty-five families, fifty baptized members, no meetinghouse, and a preacher with a long unshaven beard. The neighbors called them Dunkards, for the three-time immersion baptisms that gave them their name. What that historian could not see was the theological drift already underway in Andrew Feaster's circle - a quiet conviction, passed from father to son, that God's love was wide enough to save everyone. Sixty years later, that conviction would put a small white meetinghouse on a Fairfield County hillside, the only Universalist church South Carolina would manage to build.

Image: Bill Fitzpatrick | CC BY-SA 3.0

Liberty Universalist Church and Feasterville Academy Historic District: The Pennsylvania Family

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit UU Archivist, CC BY-SA 4.0. Andrew Feaster left Lancaster County in eastern Pennsylvania sometime in the 1770s, tried his luck in a Wilkes County, Georgia land grant in 1774, then moved his family north to the Broad River bottoms in Fairfield County. He brought with him the German Baptist Brethren tradition...

Image: UU Archivist | CC BY-SA 4.0

Liberty Universalist Church and Feasterville Academy Historic District: How Hell Got Empty

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit UU Archivist, CC BY-SA 4.0. The drift away from eternal damnation happened slowly, through three preachers across half a century. David Martin, a Brethren minister who arrived in South Carolina in 1754, encountered the writings of the English clergyman William Law around 1780 and began to doubt the doctrine...

Image: UU Archivist | CC BY-SA 4.0

Liberty Universalist Church and Feasterville Academy Historic District: Building the Meeting House

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit UU Archivist, CC BY-SA 4.0. John Feaster oversaw the construction of the church in 1831, the same year the South Carolina Convention of Universalists held its second meeting in Feasterville. A newspaper account from that September praised the zeal of the local brothers "in building the Liberty Meeting House...

Image: UU Archivist | CC BY-SA 4.0

Liberty Universalist Church and Feasterville Academy Historic District: After the Convention Died

Sat, 30 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit UU Archivist, CC BY-SA 4.0. The South Carolina Convention of Universalists met for the last time at Liberty Church in 1860, on the eve of secession. Through Reconstruction the church drifted into near-dormancy, and by 1870 a national report noted that Liberty was the only Universalist building left in the s...

Image: UU Archivist | CC BY-SA 4.0