A Quiet Walk to the Water: Historic Baptismal Trail, Riceboro
Just off E.B. Cooper Highway in Riceboro sits a short trail that most drivers miss. For nearly a hundred years, this was not a park. It was holy ground.
As early as the 1840s, enslaved members of the congregation tied to North Newport Church came here to be baptized in a still pool of water near a fishing hole called Round Hole. In 1854, the white congregation moved to Walthourville. The people who remained renamed their church First African Baptist Church—the oldest African American church in Liberty County—and kept walking this same path to the water. They sang hymns on the way. They used the pool until the early 1940s.
Descendants of that church, many of them Gullah Geechee families who still live nearby, kept the story in oral history and church records. The City of Riceboro later built a public trail so the place would not disappear into the woods.
Today the walk is self-guided and free. A tree-lined path leads to a boardwalk, a viewing platform over the original baptismal pool, benches, picnic tables, and signs about both the faith history and the plants that grow here. Hours are generally 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekends. Call the City of Riceboro at 912-884-2986 before you go; hours can change.
This is not a large attraction. It does not need to be. Stand on the boardwalk, and you are looking at the same water where a community claimed its faith while still in bondage, then kept claiming it after emancipation, for almost a century.
Historic Baptismal Trail
8805 E.B. Cooper Highway
Riceboro, GA 31323
Free admission. Self-guided.
Nearby: First African Baptist Church, 1709 Barrington Ferry Road.
