Skewarkey Church: A Baptist Congregation Since the Revolution

Near here stands one of the oldest Baptist congregations in North Carolina. Skewarkey Church was founded around seventeen eighty, during the American Revolution, as a branch of Flat Swamp Church. It became its own congregation in seventeen eighty-seven, with Martin Ross as its first ordained minister.

By the eighteen thirties the church had joined the Primitive Baptist tradition, which rejected missionary societies and musical instruments in worship. The congregation grew influential enough to spin off five daughter churches across eastern Carolina between seventeen ninety-one and eighteen twenty-seven. The current building, a simple Greek Revival timber-frame structure, was raised in eighteen fifty-eight and eighteen fifty-nine.

It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in two thousand five.