Pilgrim Baptist Church, St. Paul

Pilgrim Baptist Church in St. Paul was the first African American Baptist church established in Minnesota. The congregation was founded during the Civil War, in 1863, by enslaved people who had escaped from Missouri, including pastor Robert Thomas Hickman. The church’s third building (732 West Central Ave.) was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.

Robert Thomas Hickman was born into slavery around 1830 in Boone County, Missouri. While enslaved, he worked as a rail splitter, cutting up logs for building fences. After being taught to read by his enslaver, Hickman became a preacher, ministering to other enslaved individuals in the area. His wife, Minta, was born around 1837 in Missouri; she and their children were enslaved in Boone County by another owner, who lived near Robert’s enslaver.

In the spring of 1863, Robert, Minta, and their children escaped their enslavers and tried to flee north out of Missouri. Ultimately they made their way to a contraband camp in St. Louis, where they found a steamboat called the Northerner. The boat then brought them up the Mississippi River to Fort Snelling, Minnesota.*

On May 6, 1863, approximately 125 people arrived at Fort Snelling via the Northerner. Among them were some of Pilgrim’s charter members: the Hickmans, Fielding and Adeline Combs, Henry and Charlotte Moffit, John B. and Elizabeth Trotter, and Giles Crenshaw. They settled in St. Paul, called themselves Pilgrims, and initially held church services in private homes.

As the freedom seekers and their families settled into their new lives in St. Paul, Rev. Hickman sought a place of worship for his group. In November 1863, the Pilgrims succeeded in renting a space in a music hall from Good Samaritans in the Good Templars, a temperance society based at the Concert Hall Building on Third Street. The Pilgrims later petitioned the trustees of First Baptist Church of St. Paul to purchase in trust a lot worth $200.00 on Sibley Street near Morris Street, on which to build a meeting place.

First Baptist Church of St. Anthony gave a portion of their building, which was being razed, to Pilgrim’s congregation to be used in the construction of the new church. With this support, Pilgrim’s first dedicated structure was built in 1872 of stone and wood on the Sibley Street site. It cost $2400.00, measured thirty-five feet by seventy-five feet, and had a seating capacity of 300.

Between 1864 and 1866, Rev. Hickman and his followers had been part of First Baptist Church of St. Paul and worshiped under Hickman’s direction, with sponsorship from First Baptist Church. On November 15, 1866, Pilgrim Baptist was formally organized and celebrated with a baptismal service on the shores of the Mississippi River. The church was then incorporated in 1870. Rev. Hickman, meanwhile, was licensed to preach, ordained, and became the congregation’s official minister in 1878. In 1886 the church moved from the Sibley Street location to Cedar and Thirteenth Streets. After the move, Hickman retired and was succeeded by Rev. Bird J. Wickins.

Civil rights worker Nellie Francis and her husband, diplomat William T. Francis, were active members of Pilgrim Baptist throughout the 1890s and 1910s. Both were singers and performed in the church’s choir. In 1909, Nellie successfully persuaded Andrew Carnegie to donate an Estey organ to the church via his charitable foundation in New York. The congregation remained active throughout the 1910s, participating in local milestones like the founding of the St. Paul chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).

The congregation grew in the 1910s, creating an urgent need for a larger building, and a new church was built in 1928 at the corner of Central and Grotto Avenues in St. Paul (732 W. Central Avenue). The move brought the congregation into the heart of St. Paul’s Rondo neighborhood. In the same year, Pilgrim Baptist participated in the founding of the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center. The church’s members in this period included Frank Boyd, founder of the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters, and S. Edward Hall. Both Boyd and Hall served as the church’s deacons.

In the 1960s, when construction of Interstate 94 displaced thousands of Rondo residents, Pilgrim Baptist members took action to keep their community together. They requested that the City of St. Paul build a pedestrian bridge over the interstate at Grotto Street North, so that members could continue to walk to church. City officials complied, creating one of the new freeway’s few pedestrian crossing points. Pilgrim Baptist’s Rev. Floyd Massey, working with the Rondo–St. Anthony Improvement Association, stopped the construction of an elevated freeway.

Pilgrim Baptist Church celebrated the 150th anniversary of its founding in June 2013. The congregation held a banquet, published a commemorative book, and hosted a worship service with guest speaker Rev. George Waddles, president of the National Baptist Convention Congress of Christian Education.

*Editor’s note: On April 17, 1863, General Henry Sibley had requested that contraband refugees travel from St. Louis to Minnesota to work as teamsters (wagon drivers) at Fort Snelling due to wartime labor shortages. It’s possible that this request inspired Hickman and his congregation to choose Fort Snelling as their destination.