Kehukee Primitive Baptist Church is a historic Primitive Baptist church building in Halifax County, North Carolina located about a mile (1.5 km) south of Scotland Neck off NC Route 125. It was built in 1872 and is a simple gable-front frame structure subsequently sheathed in weatherboard. A Gothic Revival style frame tower was added in 1901. Also on the property is a church cemetery established in 1889.
The Kehukee congregation's previous meeting house, at a different site, was the location in 1769 for the foundation of the Kehukee Baptist Association of churches from North Carolina and southern Virginia, and in 1827 of the Primitive Baptist Kehukee Declaration issued by the association. The 1872 site, including the cemetery, was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 1994.
Kehukee congregation
The original Kehukee (formerly also Quehuky) meeting house was built about 1742 by William Surginer or Sojourner (1706–1750), a General Baptist from Burley, Isle of Wight County, Virginia who acquired land in the basin of the Kehukee Swamp, a creek which flows into the Roanoke River, and settled there in the mid-1720s. The church stood near the creek and two miles east of Scotland Neck, on land donated by Surginer, its first minister. About 1755 the congregation adopted practices based on those of the Philadelphia Baptist Association after a visit by two of the latter's elders, Benjamin Miller and William Van Horne (father of Thomas Van Horne). As the earliest Baptist church in the region, Kehukee was direct or indirect mother church of many others. It was the founding site of the Kehukee Association in 1769, but not the leading church within that association.
As a subsidiary branch of the Kehukee congregation, a "new meeting house" was established on Fishing Creek (not to be confused with Lower Fishing Creek church, founded by Charles Daniel). It was sometimes called "Cotten's meeting house", and later "Lawrence's meeting house" after elder Joshua Lawrence. By 1803 "deaths, excommunications, and removals" had reduced the membership of the "old meeting house" at Kehukee to much less than that at Fishing Creek, In 1806 the association recognised Lawrence's Meeting House as a separate member church.
The Kehukee church had no minister from 1830 to 1860, when elder John W. Stamper took over. In 1871–72 the current church was built a mile south of Scotland Neck. The old church was torn down soon after, Local historian Charlie Dunn Alston believes the old site was donated for a church for freedmen, and now holds the Kehukee Baptist Church, a Black church on Sherman Drive off NC Route 903 ().
The addition of the steeple to Kehukee Primitive Baptist Church in 1901 is ascribed to John Coughenour, a sawmill owner who lived within sight of the church and preferred the steepled designs of his native Pennsylvania. Church membership declined from 62 in 1905 to 40 in 1919, and steadily thereafter. The last member, Lena Andrews Shackell, died in 1979 aged 102, and the last regular church meeting was held in 1981. The property reverted to the Kehukee Association, which still occasionally used the building for meetings. Later it was sold to a local resident who had already been volunteering in its upkeep.
Kehukee Association
The Kehukee Association was formed at the Kehukee church, probably in 1769, by several Baptist churches (most named after nearby watercourses) in Halifax, Edgecombe, Warren, Bertie, and Camden counties. Dozens more churches from surrounding areas joined in subsequent decades. Some of these later endorsed Free Will Baptism and left the association. Provincial North Carolina's Regulator Insurrection (1768–1771) devastated the western base of Shubal Stearns' Sandy Creek Association, whose few churches in the province's east asked to join Kehukee instead. Some of the old Kehukee Regulars accepted affiliation of Separatists without requiring re-baptism, precipitating a split in 1775 between these "United Baptists" and the hardline Regulars. The split ended in 1786, when the reunited group was named the United Baptist Association. In 1777, ten churches of the Regular Baptist faction made a confession of faith which was implicitly endorsed after the reunification.