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Big Pigeon Baptist Church - Cocke County, TN |
| By about 1785 or 1786, there was a group of frontier people who had settled at the French Broad and Big Pigeon rivers, in what is now Cocke County, TN. Some of these settlers were Baptist by conviction. In 1787 these God-fearing pioneers formed the Baptist Society on Big Pigeon River (Big Pigeon Baptist Church). A few years later the Abraham Hiestand family (although other spellings of that surname appear in the church minutes) joined that little congregation. The Daniel Hiestand/Haston to whom this site is dedicated was the youngest brother of this Abraham Hiestand. But Abraham Hiestand also had a son by the name of Daniel, who was an adult by the time Abraham's family is involved in the Big Pigeon church. The "Daniel Haston" mentioned in the church's minutes was probably the son of Abraham Hiestand, not his brother. The Big Pigeon Baptist Church was established in the home of James English, near the point where English Creek empties into the Pigeon River. The first building of the Big Pigeon Baptist Church, built about 1794, stood on the Edwina Road. These locations are on the east side of Newport, TN in Cocke Co, TN. (Source: Page 6 of Cocke County, Tennessee, and its People, published by the Cocke County Heritage Book Committee & Don Mills, Inc., 1992)
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