Mount Elvin Baptist Church sits quietly on a minor knoll off Hindustan Road on the outskirts of New Grant in southern Trinidad. It is an unpretentious church and however it can be regarded as the epicenter of the Baptist religion in Trinidad and Tobago. This church was set up in 1816 and the importance of that day has to do with the settlement of the “Merikens” in Trinidad in that yr.
In 1816 demobilized Africans who experienced served in the British Military during the War of 1812 in between the British and the Americans had been settled in Trinidad in what arrived to be acknowledged as the Firm Villages. According to A.B. Huggins in his e-book “the Saga of the Businesses” the phrase “Merikens” arose simply because these people could not properly pronounce the letter A in American. John McNish Weiss in his paper “The Corps of Colonial Marines” claims that these “Merikin” troopers ended up slaves in the Usa who were promised their liberty if they fought for the British. Recruited by the British very first in Maryland and Virginia and afterwards in Georgia, they had been a preventing unit much praised for valor and discipline.
When the British Army organizations still left for residence in England in April 1815, the six Black businesses grew to become the 3rd Battalion Colonial Marines, garrisoned in Bermuda on Ireland Island. They did garrison obligation and labored as artisans and laborers in the constructing of the new Royal Naval Dockyard in Bermuda. When transfer to the West India Regiments was proposed the gentlemen turned down the concept. Their persistent intransigence lastly led the British government to provide to place them in Trinidad as independent farmers. On accepting the offer you they remaining Bermuda on fifteen July 1816.The first team of 71 settled in Dunmore Hill and Mount Elvin even though the second team of 72 settled in Indian Walk.
These ended up religious people who adopted the Baptist faith practiced in the southern United States. Although there ended up no clergymen between them there ended up five gentlemen who have been described as Anabaptist preachers who held Sunday ceremonies. One particular of these gentlemen was identified as Brother Will Hamilton. In baptist church in Raleigh (Baptist) despatched staff to Guyana and Tobago and in 1809 a single of them, Thomas Adam, relocated to Trinidad. He and later on Reverend George Cowen even though operating on the establishment of St John’s Baptist Church in Port of Spain Trinidad also gave help to these African-American ex-slaves who have been working towards a variation of the Baptist faith. In time, the similarities of the religion led to the adoption of the missionaries’ version of the Baptist faith that came to be referred to as in Trinidad, London Baptist.
In excess of time however, in accordance to Ashram Stapleton in his e-book “The Birth and Development of the Baptist Church in Trinidad and Tobago”, there created a schism as some folks in the church wished particular African procedures provided and the London Missionary Society frowned on people techniques. Sooner or later these persons left the church and had been initial named the “Disobedient Baptists” and ultimately the Religious or Shouter Baptist. Other variations within the London Baptists then led to further variations of the Baptist faith with the improvement of the Impartial Baptists and the Basic Baptists.