A mile south of here stood Freedom Hill Wesleyan Methodist Church, a simple frame building measuring 27 by 36 feet and dedicated in March 1848. After local residents appealed to the Wesleyans in Ohio for a minister in 1847, the Rev. Adam Crooks came to serve the congregation. The Wesleyans, among the South’s most outspoken abolitionist groups, held that no Christian could in conscience own slaves, much like the Quakers, and conflict with the surrounding slaveholding society followed. Pro-slavery mobs attacked the congregation and fired small arms at the church door, yet neither Crooks nor the congregation renounced their beliefs. Members took part in the Underground Railroad, risking their property, families, and lives, and nearby hiding places were used by runaway slaves. During the Civil War, members also concealed deserters, draft resisters, and escaped Federal prisoners of war, acts that could have brought confinement in the Confederate prison at Salisbury if discovered. Unlike Quakers, Wesleyans were not acknowledged by North Carolina’s government as pacifists, and conscription wagons carried many of them into forced military service. The old church was moved twice and now stands on the campus of Southern Wesleyan University in Central, South Carolina. Adam Crooks, who came from Ohio in 1847, was tarred and feathered in effigy, beaten, poisoned twice, barred from speaking at courthouses in Guilford and Forsyth counties, and jailed in Randolph for his faith. In 1851 North Carolina forced him to leave, but by then he had established Wesleyan abolitionist churches in North Carolina and Virginia, and the abuse he suffered contributed to his early death.