I am interested in reviewing any information which places Brethren in the Mecklenburg County, North Carolina area prior to 1800. ************* Please keep me informed on anything you receive. My own ancestor was the minister, Conrad Kearns, of the Crane Creek Church at Salisbury NC (during the American Revolution), and I myself helped start the Friendship Church at North Wilkesboro NC (back in the late '50s). I do have interest in the Brethren in the Carolinas. As far as I know, there is no information on any such settlement. We have information on areas north on the Catawbe and Yadkin Rivers, and into South Carolina on the Catawbe and Broad Rivers. There may have been early Brethren there near Charlotte. It may take a detailed search of particular families, with inclusion of their neighbors. Roger Sappington wrote a history of the Brethren in the Carolinas in 1971. The first chapter is on this early period. It does not mention Mecklenburg Co. We have found some information about the area since then, but primarily as we have searched the actions and migration of individual families. I've tried to keep a file on these. The present Church of the Brethren in North Carolina (and the few churches in South Carolina) are the result of much later church action. Most of them starting about the 1890s. Annual Meeting took action against the "Universalism" in the Carolinas in the 1790s [it was considered a distortion of the Pietist belief in "Eternal Restoration"] - put the leaders on the "Ban" and the churches disappeared. Except for the recovered writings of Morgan Edwards, there is little or no information of the earlier Brethren churches in the Carolinas. Merle C Rummel