Henry Evans, the Shoemaker Who Planted Methodism

In the history of American religion, there are figures who changed entire denominations from the outside in. Henry Evans was one of them, and he did it in Fayetteville, beginning around seventeen eighty.

Evans was a free Black man from Virginia, a shoemaker by trade, and a licensed Methodist preacher. He was traveling to Charleston, South Carolina, when he stopped in Fayetteville and, in the way of certain people in history, simply stayed.

He began preaching to enslaved Black residents. Town authorities told him to stop, calling his work agitation. Evans kept moving, holding services out in the sandhills surrounding town, changing location constantly to avoid the authorities and the occasional mob.

But something shifted. White slaveowners began to notice that their enslaved workers were behaving differently after attending Evans's services, with more composure, more dignity, in the slaveowners' own telling. That observation, however paternalistic its framing, opened a door. Evans was allowed back into town.

Eventually his congregation grew to include prominent white families. According to the record, whites came in such numbers that, by some accounts, the Black parishioners were crowded out of their own seats. Evans responded by expanding the building.

Bishop Francis Asbury, one of the founding figures of American Methodism, visited the congregation multiple times. In his journal in January of eighteen oh five, he called it simply the African meeting house. Bishop William Capers later wrote that Evans was the best preacher of his time in that quarter of North Carolina.

Evans lived in a small room at the back of the church until he died in eighteen ten. The congregation he founded became Evans Metropolitan African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church, which still stands today on North Cool Spring Street, built in eighteen ninety-three.

He came through as a traveler and stayed as a founder.