The Brick Church

First African Baptist Church on Montgomery Street, facing Franklin Square, was finished in 1859 at a cost of $26,000 by a congregation made up largely of enslaved people, and Savannah long called it the brick church. E. K. Love, its pastor, wrote in the church's 1888 history that it was the only brick building owned by Black people in the city or the state. The Georgia Historical Society marker in Franklin Square says congregants, free and enslaved, built it of Savannah Grey brick. The church had bought the property from a white Baptist congregation in 1832 for $1,500. The pastor Andrew C. Marshall began raising the money, and in 1856 he went north to preach for it in New York pulpits.

Love wrote that Marshall could not get passage home by steamer because of a free-state law against carrying a slave back to a slave state, so he went overland and died in Richmond, Virginia, in December 1856. William J. Campbell, born enslaved in 1812, became pastor in 1857, tore down the old wooden church and raised the brick one.

The building's best-known story is absent from Love's history. Tours and many published accounts say the holes in the sanctuary floor let freedom seekers breathe while they hid beneath it, on the Underground Railroad. The church's own history says the holes are in the shape of an African prayer symbol known to some as a BaKongo cosmogram, of birth, life, death and rebirth, and the Underground Railroad figure it names is a deacon, March Haynes. Love recorded that Haynes served on the Union side, helped people from Savannah reach Union lines, and was badly wounded in one attempt.