Steele Creek and the Seven Sisters Churches

The ground near Steele Creek holds one of the oldest Presbyterian roots in the Carolina backcountry. Scots-Irish settlers organized a congregation here before seventeen sixty, part of a wave of Ulster immigrants who followed the Great Wagon Road south from Pennsylvania in the mid-seventeen hundreds.

The churches they planted became known as the Seven Sisters. Sugar Creek came first, in seventeen fifty-six. Then Hopewell in seventeen sixty-two, Poplar Tent in seventeen sixty-four, Centre in seventeen sixty-five, Steele Creek in seventeen sixty-six, Providence in seventeen sixty-seven, and Philadelphia in seventeen seventy. Together they formed a tight-knit Presbyterian network across what is now Mecklenburg and Cabarrus counties. Their ministers preached, kept schools, and recorded births and deaths for communities that had no other civic institution. Many of the men who signed the Mecklenburg resolves of seventeen seventy-five worshipped in these pews.