Lawrenceburg’s Mysterious Cannonball

Posted on February 18, 2026 by Clint

In 1956, a crew from the Lawrenceburg Street Department found something unusual buried beneath downtown Lawrenceburg.

After the crew dug it up, foreman Ira Johnson examined it and determined that it was a cannonball.

Beyond this, we know maddeningly little about the cannonball. Neither the article published about the cannonball in the May 25, 1956 edition of the ‘Democrat-Union’ nor the article about it in the Historical Society’s newsletter of the time mentions where, exactly, the cannonball was unearthed. It also does not provide specifics about the size of the ball or its appearance, all of which could be useful clues in understanding how and when it came to be embedded in the streets of Lawrenceburg.

We do know that, a week later, Ira donated the cannonball to the Lawrence County Historical Society, who had set up a display of local antiquities in the “large double windows of Richardson Hardware Company” at the time. The president of the society speculated at the time that it could be “the only cannonball ever fired at the courthouse.” The president provided the ‘Democrat-Union’ with a version of the events of November 3, 1863.

He explained at the time that “the Yankees were set to shell the Courthouse and town. One shot was fired at the Courthouse then an officer ran in and shouted: ‘Stop! Nearby is a monument to the Mexican heroes’ and so not another shot was fired.”

The one problem with the president’s explanation is that the Federal unit preparing to destroy the courthouse probably did not have a cannon. Indeed, the sole account we have of the event from Thomas Fitzgibbon, the Union commander, says that his men burned the jail, but “The citizens begged that I would spare the court-house, as its destruction would disfigure and perhaps mutilate and destroy a monument close by, erected in memory of those of its former residents who died on the plains of Mexico defending the Republic.”

It is unlikely–though not impossible–that Fitzgibbon’s mounted infantry unit carried an artillery piece during the fight at Lawrenceburg. If so, he never mentions it. Fitzgibbon was outnumbered and away from his base of operations, and seemed intent on accomplishing his mission in Lawrenceburg with all speed.

However, Lawrenceburg was, indeed, shelled before the Civil War was over, in November 1864–but it was shelled by Confederate artillery. As Robert L. Morris of the 21st Tennessee Cavalry described it: “…the attack was sufficient to check the advance of the enemy, and they retired to Lawrenceburg. With the appearance of Jackson his artillery was favorably stationed and fire opened on the town. In the afternoon, with the troops dismounted, an assault was made. The Twenty-first Tennessee and Twenty-eighth Mississippi, occupying the center of the line, bore the brunt of the engagement. So swiftly and hardly were the enemy pressed that their camp was taken and a good deal of valuable material and much-needed rations captured.”

Colonel Datus Cooon, the commander of the Union cavalry which fought Morris and his comrades in Lawrenceburg that day summarized the skirmish at the time in these terms: “…in compliance with orders I immediately put my command in line of battle on north side of town. The enemy soon opened with one section of artillery when my battery replied. An hour was spent in firing by artillery on both sides with no result, when we were ordered to fall back on Pulaski road, Second Brigade to take the rear. My pickets and command withdrew in good order, though heavily pressed by superior force. Halted and camped seven miles east of Lawrenceburg.”

According to these accounts, Lawrenceburg was the scene of an hour-long artillery duel on November 22, 1864. While we can’t be sure, this would seem to be a more likely source of the road crew’s mysterious cannonball than Fitzgibbon’s 1863 sparing of the courthouse.

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Smallpox in Lawrence County

Posted on February 10, 2026 by Clint

On this day 150 years ago, smallpox was raging through parts of Lawrence County.

On February 10, 1876, the Pulaski ‘Citizen’ published a chilling blurb from the Lawrenceburg ‘Free Press.’ It said, “We learn that there are several cases of smallpox in the southern portion of our county, among our German citizens. Most of the fatal cases have been among children.”

Smallpox was the scourge of mankind for millennia. It has been detected in Egyptian mummies. It killed kings and paupers, alike. Native Americans, who had no natural immunity to the virus, were decimated by it for four centuries after contact with Europeans. Characterized by the presence of hundreds of tiny blisters, smallpox was very contagious and could be spread by coughing and sneezing. Among European populations, roughly one of every three who contracted smallpox died from it.

In addition to the high mortality rate of the disease, smallpox often left its mark on survivors in the form of disfiguring scars and high rates of blindness.

Early efforts to combat the disease lead to the creation of the world’s first vaccine. Edward Jenner discovered that survivors of the less-lethal cowpox did not become infected with smallpox. In 1796, he performed an experiment in which he infected an eight-year-old boy with cowpox and then attempted to infect him with smallpox. The boy never caught smallpox, despite being intentionally exposed to it on several more occasions throughout his life.

Because he exposed his patients to cowpox, Jenner called his process “vaccination” after the Latin word “vaccinus,” which means “cow.”

Before there were hospitals in every county, one of the most common means of controlling the virus in the nineteenth century was by quarantining sufferers in dedicated recovery homes called “pest houses.”

A month after the ‘Citizen’ reported the rise of smallpox cases among the German Catholics of southern Lawrence County, an article in the Columbia ‘Herald’ related the use of the pest house in Maury County. It said, “Two [smallpox] deaths have occurred–one on Bear Creek last week and one in Macedonia, who refused to be carried to the pest-house, and perhaps did not receive the careful nursing from his immediate friends that he would have enjoyed at the city quarantine. Of the three now in the pest-house, one is convalescent and the other two doing well…our readers shall be kept advised of the progress or abatement of the disease. In the meantime, we suggest upon the part of all the prudent precaution of an early vaccination.”

In 1959, after the Pan American Health Organization successfully eradicated smallpox from most of the western hemisphere, the World Health Organization began a campaign to eradicate smallpox from the planet. Using a strategy known as “ring vaccination,” the WHO mobilized an army of medical personnel and volunteers to administer the smallpox vaccine wherever the virus broke out around the world. The last naturally-occurring case of the disease was detected in 1977.

On May 8, 1980, the WHO announced that smallpox had officially been eradicated from the planet.

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William Hicks and the Struggles of Lawrence County’s Free People of Color

Posted on February 1, 2026 by Clint

One Lawrence County man was taken to court in 1858 for the crime of…staying in Tennessee too long?

Enslaved people who were freed before the Civil War or African-Americans who were born free were known as free people of color. From the 1820s until the Civil War, Lawrence County had a very small population of these people. The Federal Census of 1860 shows that no fewer than 21 free people of color called Lawrence County home in that year. Seventeen of them lived near Lawrenceburg and four lived near Henryville.

One of the free people of color living near Henryville was William Hicks, who was born around 1822 in North Carolina. In 1860, he was living as a laborer in the home of 60-year-old Jane Wright, who had also been born in North Carolina. In 1858, Hicks was taken to court for “remaining in the state longer than the statute allows for free persons of color not born in the state of Tennessee.”

According to court documents, William Hicks was a mixed-race person who had been born a free man. His court case records say that he was born in North Carolina, and census records indicate that he was born around 1822.

In most Southern states before the Civil War, a person’s freedom was determined by the condition of his mother. If the mother was free, then her children would be born free, regardless of the condition of the father. But if the mother was a slave, her children would be born slaves, regardless of the condition of the father.

Although the court documents in Hicks’s case do not go into further detail about the circumstances surrounding his birth, it is clear that he–and others like him–presented a conundrum to the judicial system of Tennessee.

A law passed by the state in 1831 said that all free persons of color residing in Tennessee were to vacate the state within 20 days of their arrival, and no enslaved person was to be allowed his or her freedom unless the master could first arrange for their transport to another state or territory. Violation of the law was considered a felony by the free person of color, and initially carried steep fines for the former master.

Hicks moved to Lawrence County on July 10, 1850. By staying in the county for almost a decade, Hicks had clearly broken the law. However, the judge in Hicks’s case was of the opinion that Hicks did not qualify as a free person of color under the Act of 1831, simply because the law was too vague.

The judge said that the law specifically addressed the condition of mixed-race people who had been liberated by their masters, but that the law was not clear enough about the position of mixed-race people who had been born free.

Upon motion from the defense, the indictment was therefore quashed by the judge. Hicks did not stay in Lawrence County; he never appears in another Lawrence County census after 1860, although Jane Wright’s descendants stayed near Henryville for many years following the Civil War.

Cases like Hicks’s illustrate the tension and confusion created by harsh antebellum laws which regulated the behavior and limited the rights of free people of color.

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How Lawrence County Became Amish Paradise

Posted on January 26, 2026 by Clint

Lawrence County has been a literal Amish paradise for 82 years this month.

On January 21, 1944, according to an article in the Nashville ‘Banner,’ the families of Joe E. Yoder and Jacob Gingerich began moving into leased buildings on a 200-acre farm at Three Oaks, north of Lawrenceburg. Their goal was to conduct a yearlong experiment to see if the area would suit their agricultural and lifestyle needs.

The families had their belongings shipped by rail from their homes in Lumberton, Mississippi, with plans to bring another family from Mississippi and “at least a dozen more families” from Holmes County, Ohio. Dan Yoder’s family arrived shortly after the first two families.

As the move took place in the last months of World War II, the ‘Banner’ article placed great emphasis on the Amish men’s status as conscientious objectors. The Amish and Mennonite faiths have a long history of objecting to military service. At the time he moved to Lawrence County, Yoder had two brothers in “camps for conscientious objectors.” These camps were a unique way to allow conscientious objectors to perform “work of national importance” without wearing a uniform. Men who lived at these camps performed a number of important duties, from working at psychiatric hospitals to participating as “guinea pigs” in studies, to fighting forest fires.

Yoder was quick to assure the ‘Banner’ that the Amish were not communists. “We colonize for fellowship,” he said, “and every man is his own agent. We do not operate a cooperative store. We try to raise every item of food eaten in our homes, but we buy meats, citrus fruits, and other foods when we run short. We expect to live a normal American life. We patronize doctors, dentists, and stores in the towns near us, and our life except for religious belief and objection to war is no different to that of any other American.”

At the time, little was said about the Amish traveling by horse and buggy, because, despite the increasing presence of automobiles on local roads, many native Lawrence Countians still used horses and mules to travel and plow in 1944.

The road to Lawrence County was long and winding for these pioneering Amish families. Originally from Wayne County, Ohio, they had moved to Mississippi due to the compulsory school attendance laws in Ohio, which required every child to attend school until the age of eighteen. The Old Order Swartzentruber Amish operated their own schools, but they believed that children should only attend school through the eighth grade.

However, as Bobby Alford points out in his article ‘The Amish in Lawrence County,’ these three Amish families soon grew dissatisfied with the “hot, steamy Delta lowland” in Mississippi and sought a place where they could operate their schools without interference as well as practice the type of diversified agriculture with which they were accustomed. They sent an enquiry to the Tennessee Commissioner of Agriculture, who directed them to look at Lawrence County, where a great deal of timber had recently been cleared and farmland was relatively cheap.

After the initial families came, and the first Amish school was founded in the county without issue, Emmanuel Gingerich and his family followed that fall. In 1947, ten Amish families from Indiana came and settled to the south and west of Ethridge. When they finally decided to purchase farms in Lawrence County, the Amish paid cash, as they would “make no debts.” Lawrence County has the largest population of Old Order Amish people in the South today, and the Amish churches here still operate their parochial schools through the eighth grade.

Amish religious beliefs vary slightly from congregation to congregation, but their overriding impulse is to maintain separation from the world and live as simply as possible. Their nineteenth-century-patterned clothing is made in sober, dark colors with no buttons or zippers. They travel and farm with horses and maintain farms which are largely self-sufficient and consist of plain, clean homes and outbuildings with no electricity. They will not work on Sunday, and do not permit the ownership or creation of any graven image of themselves or their property, including photographs. They will construct no edifice for public worship, and instead gather in each others’ homes each Sunday for church services conducted in their native dialect of German.

Although they largely kept to themselves at first, a period of prolonged drought in the 1980s caused many local Amish craftsmen to open their doors to tourists to supplement their harvests. Today, tourism is a major source of income to the Amish, who, in addition to selling seasonal produce from their gardens, operate small businesses that range from furniture construction to candlemaking to leatherworking.

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That Time David Crockett Killed 105 Bears in One Winter

Posted on January 25, 2026 by Clint

Did you know that Lawrence County founding father David Crockett claimed to have killed 105 bears in one winter–including 47 of them in one month?

In his autobiography, David Crockett wrote that the winter of 1825-1826 was very busy. This just a few years after he left Lawrence County for West Tennessee, Crockett claimed to have killed 105 bears in one winter, including one bear that he supposedly killed with a hunting knife after chasing the beast into a crevice made by the New Madrid earthquakes of 1811-1812.

Although many of the hunting stories told in Crockett’s autobiography are believed to be exaggerated, it is true that he was an avid hunter. Crockett’s autobiography devotes more space to descriptions of bear hunting than it does to stories about his family.

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When Shoal Creek Was Called Indian Creek

Posted on January 22, 2026 by Clint

Shoal Creek was once known as Indian Creek?

In the spring of 1818, David Crockett and a group of other important men met at a place about four miles north of Pine Bluff, and listened to a man named Henry tell the story of one of the most frightening nights of his life.

Like a faded map to buried treasure, Henry knew something that was very valuable.

The story begins at the Revolutionary War battle of Ramsour’s Mill, North Carolina. There, on June 20, 1780, Captain Gilbreath Falls was killed in action at the head of his patriot cavalry company.

The state of North Carolina rewarded his sacrifice by granting his widow and children joint ownership of a 4,000-acre tract of land in the state’s western frontier.

In 1784, when the grant was made, the border of that tract of land began “on Indian Creek beginning at the first fork of said creek above General Rutherford’s encampment, near an Indian encampment.”

However, that vast tract of land–an estate of 6.25 square miles–was in a wild section of the country in 1784, squarely in the center of Chickasaw territory. Indeed, white settlers largely stayed away from it until the autumn of 1816, when the Federal government purchased it from the Chickasaw and the settlers decided to call the place Lawrence County.

But who was General Rutherford? And where was Indian Creek?

When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, North Carolina—like the other newly-independent states—was short on cash. To pay its veterans, it devised a system of land grants in the wild territory west of the Appalachians.

At that time, North Carolina laid claim to all of the land that would become Tennessee in 1796. To explore and survey land for these land grants, North Carolina sent General Griffith Rutherford on a surveying expedition in 1784. His men spent weeks hacking through the wilderness, noting the location of important landmarks.

Rutherford’s son, Henry, was present with this expedition. Three decades later, it was Henry who met Crockett and the other commissioners north of Pine Bluff and shared his story.

Henry said the creek was called “Indian Creek” because “a plain Indian reed passed up and down the creek.” This was probably a variety of native cane. By Crockett’s time, however, Indian Creek was known as Shoal Creek, the name we still call it today.

In March 1784, Rutherford’s men began following Indian Creek “in sight of a small quantity of pine timber on the opposite bluff,” the place in modern Lawrenceburg that has been known for more than two-hundred years as Pine Bluff. Today it sits opposite the Lawrenceburg Water Filtration Plant on one side and David Crockett State Park on the other. Somewhere about 3-5 miles north of the bluff, they came to the site of a “large Indian camp” on the bank of the creek, and decided to make camp for the night.

Henry was terrified.

The signs, he said, were all around that the Indians were still in the vicinity. Thomas Gillespie, another member of the expedition, remembered that they found “saplings chopped & bent down & as we judged for the purpose of conveying the wounded” near the camp. Henry “was very apprehensive that they would be disturbed that night by Indians.”

Although the night passed peacefully, all of these circumstances ensured that the Indian campground where General Rutherford’s men spent the night just north of Pine Bluff would be a memorable place for the men who camped there. Perhaps that’s why the surveyor used it as the beginning point of Captain Falls’s massive land grant.

By 1818, when Falls’s heirs were ready to cash in on their claim, Indian Creek had a new name and few people were left who remembered where Rutherford’s men had spent that night in 1784.

Crockett–by 1818 a magistrate and a man on the rise–and a group of other commissioners were appointed by the county court to collect testimony from Henry Rutherford and other survivors of the expedition to ascertain as closely as they could where the campground was, and whether or not Indian Creek was now known as Shoal Creek.

Those depositions were all copied at some point and sent to the Tennessee Historical Commission. Today, they are in the collection of the Tennessee State Library and Archives. I first came across their existence in the footnotes of James Shackford’s biography of David Crockett. I recently transcribed the depositions and began an in-depth research project regarding the land grant. Captain Falls’s widow, as it turns out, was very likely my 4x-great-aunt.

Henry Rutherford and his father General Rutherford moved to Middle Tennessee in the early nineteenth century. Rutherford County, Tennessee, is named for the general. Henry’s memories–and the memories of the other men summoned by the commission to corroborate his testimony–were worth a literal fortune to the heirs of Captain Falls. And they are worth their weight in gold to local historians today, for preserving the memory of Lawrence County when it was a truly wild place. 

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Lawrenceburg’s New Deal Post Office

Posted on January 18, 2026 by Clint

For the first century of Lawrenceburg’s existence, the local postmaster was usually the owner of a general store or mercantile where people could come to get their mail when they were in town. Postmasters were prominent and important individuals who were instrumental not only in collecting and distributing the mail, but in vouching for the character of people in the community.

By the early twentieth century, as methods of travel and roads improved, post offices began rural free delivery, where letter carriers collected mail in wagons at the post office and carried it to people who lived in the country. As the way people got their mail changed, the role of postmaster and post office changed, as well.

The current Lawrenceburg Post Office is the result of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal. In the summer of 1934, as part of the Federal government’s efforts to jump-start the American economy out of the Great Depression, the Postmaster General of the United States announced that money had been allocated for the construction and improvement of post offices around the nation. Of the $65 million in allocated funds, $1,155,000 went to Tennessee, and of those funds, $80,000 was earmarked for the construction of a new and permanent post office in Lawrenceburg. An additional $185,000 in Federal funds was also allocated for the construction of a sewer system for Lawrenceburg.

In March 1935, the construction firm of Forcrum and James of Dyersburg was awarded the $65,000 contract to build a new post office in Lawrenceburg. The building’s location was selected with a purpose; at that time, North Military Street was the city’s main commercial artery.

According to the site ‘Living New Deal,’ the Lawrenceburg Post Office “was completed in 1935 with Louis A. Simon as supervising architect and John W. Wolcott Jr. as architect. The original building is a ‘symmetrical five-by brick building’ and has been extended with an addition that is in sympathetic design. Concrete American eagle medallions are inset above the windows on either side of the fanlight above the entrance doors. Replicas of the eagle medallions are also above 2 of the windows on the extension.”

The post office was dedicated in the autumn of 1935 in a ceremony attended by Congressman Clarence W. Turner. 

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The LCHS Bible Department

Posted on December 29, 2025 by Clint

Did you know that Lawrence County High School had a Bible Department in the early 20th century?

This photo from the collection of the Old Jail Museum shows one of the popular Bible classes at Lawrence County High School in 1913. And ,as one astute reader pointed out, this class is almost entirely female.

In the spring of 1912, LCHS student Irl Cloud wrote an article about the LCHS Bible Department for the “High School Notes” column of the Lawrence ‘Democrat.’ The department was created by local philanthropist James Stribling, who built and owned the original LCHS building on Lafayette Street, and allowed the county to use it rent-free on condition that a Bible elective was offered to the students. Mr. Stribling also paid the salary of the Bible teacher.

When Irl Cloud wrote his 1912 article about the Bible Department, it was still just a little over a year old, and it was wildly popular among the students. According to Cloud, “this grand opportunity to study the Word of God was eagerly grasped by many of the students. One hundred twenty were enrolled during the year.” This probably represented most of the school’s total enrollment at that time. In the department’s twenty year history, it is estimated that no fewer than 2,000 students took classes offered by the LCHS Bible Department.

Cloud said that, by 1912, there were “four classes daily in the Bible” being taught at LCHS by Professor J.E. Thornberry, who would head the department until it was discontinued in 1930. Cloud goes on to say that “the New Testament class was so large that it was necessary to divide it into two classes, reciting at different periods.” A fourth class was devoted to the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John.

The Bible classes were electives, but the grades students earned in them could “also be averaged in with the examination grades on regular school studies.” Cloud said that “strict daily and examination grades are kept of all the Bible classes,” and that “all strive to make our Bible grade the highest grade on our report cards.”

Cloud clarified that “the Bible in this school is taught strictly non-sectarian. The students are not urged to believe any certain creed,” although any “difficult questions are thoroughly discussed in class.” The “sole aim” of the students enrolled in the classes, according to Cloud, “is to seek the real truth.”

Since the New Testament class was split into two classes due to its size in 1912, it is not unreasonable to speculate that the class might have divided largely along gender lines as students chose to go to the class attended by their friends. If that was the case, it would explain why so many of the students in the 1913 image are female.

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A Christmas Classic First Published in Lawrenceburg

Posted on December 24, 2025 by Clint

It’s a cherished Christmas classic that’s been recorded by Ralph Stanley, Ricky Skaggs, Patty Loveless, the Judds, Emmylou Harris, and Neil Young; and it was first released in Lawrenceburg, Tennessee.

The song ‘Beautiful Star of Bethlehem’ has been a seasonal staple in choir lofts and pews around the globe for more than eighty years. Its words are simple and direct, encapsulating the hope and promise of the Christmas story with a catchy melody.

‘Beautiful Star’ was written by Robert Fisher Boyce in a dairy barn in Rutherford County in 1938. Boyce, a farmer, “wrote the song in the summer months while seated on a milking stool in the hallway of the barn,” according to his youngest son. He escaped to the barn to write his composition because “the noise of the household filled with little children was distracting.”

It took Boyce less than a week to write the song, and he maintained until his death that he was only able to do it by divine inspiration. His children agreed with him. Nannie Lou, his daughter, said that she helped him put the song to music on the family’s old upright piano. In 1940, Boyce sold his ‘Star’ to the father of Southern Gospel music, Lawrenceburg’s own James D. Vaughan.

Vaughan published ‘Beautiful Star of Bethlehem’ in 1940 in a songbook called ‘Beautiful Praise,’ where it appeared as hymn number 24. The final musical arrangement of the song was written by Adger M. Pace. The song gained national attention in 1990 when the Judds chose to sing it on the nationally-televised ‘Bob Hope Christmas Show.’

Do you have a favorite Christmas song?

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Watch Night in Lawrenceburg

Posted on December 19, 2025 by Clint

The Nashville ‘Globe’ was one of Tennessee’s most prominent African American-owned newspapers in the early 20th century. In publication from 1906 to the 1930s, it occasionally reported stories from Lawrence County’s African American community.

In January 1917, the paper’s Lawrenceburg correspondent wrote an article detailing how several local African American families spent Christmas 1916. The picture it paints is of an active, organized, and close-knit group of people celebrating, worshiping, and serving together during the holiday season.

The article says: “Christmas was the quietest witnessed in the history of Lawrenceburg. Drunkenness was put away by those who are frequent users of rum. Xmas day was a great day. Sunrise meeting at St. John M.E. Church was spiritual in the highest form.

“Mr. and Mrs. J.H. Bumpass entertained at breakfast Christmas day. Mr. and Mrs. M.L. Wigfall entertained at dinner Rev. and Mrs. Sebastian Xmas eve. Mr. and Mrs. George Symington entertained at supper Christmas evening Dr. and Mrs. Sebastian. Dr. and Mrs. B.L. Burrows Christmas night was one of the greatest events of Xmas, by way of a concert, led by Mrs. B.L. Burrows and Mrs. J.W. Sebastian.

“The post office which afforded the presents, was heavily laden. The presents were managed and distributed by Dr. B.L. Burrows. Everybody’s heart was made happy as their names were called. On Tuesday Dr. and Mrs. B.L. Burrows were highly entertained by Mr. and Mrs. Robert Linam at dinner.

“All the churches Sunday had their doors thrown ajar, with their pastors at their posts respectively with few exceptions. St. Paul Baptist Chruch had a lively meeting. Rev. W.M. Watts filling the pulpit in the absence of the pastor, Rev. C.C. Cade. Rev. J.W. Sebastian was on duty Sunday morning, preaching from Micah 2:10. Sunday watched the old year go out and the new year come in with a high, spiritual wave and a heart full of thanksgiving to God for the past year’s blessings.

“Rev. J.C. Carter delivered the Watch Meeting sermon. Mr. and Mrs. W.L. Wigfall entertained Dr. and Mrs. Burrows Sunday. Mr. and Mrs. J.A. Bumpass entertained Rev. and Mrs. J.W. Sebastian at dinner.”

The Watch Night tradition is observed across the country in African American churches. A commemoration of the Emancipation Proclamation, which took effect on January 1, 1863, the Watch Night service, according to the Smithsonian Institute, “typically begins around 7 pm on December 31 and lasts through midnight, as faith leaders guide congregants in praise and worship.

“Many congregants across the nation bow in prayer minutes before the midnight hour as they sing out ‘Watchman, watchman please tell me the hour of the night.’ In return the minister replies ‘it is three minutes to midnight’; ‘it is one minute before the new year’; and ‘it is now midnight, freedom has come,’ to bless their transition into the new year.”

Have you ever attended a Watch Night service? Share your memories in the comments! 

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