Father David Rice and Kentucky’s first Presbyterian churches

David Rice was about fifty years old when he crossed the mountains into Kentucky in 1783. Born in Hanover County, Virginia, in 1733, he had studied at the College of New Jersey (opens in a new tab), today’s Princeton, and was ordained as a Presbyterian minister in Virginia. Kentuckians came to call him “Father Rice,” and his contemporaries called him the “Apostle to Kentucky,” according to his Grokipedia biography (opens in a new tab).

He settled near Danville, where the district’s courts and statehood conventions met. In 1784 he organized Concord Church, which the First Presbyterian Church of Danville (opens in a new tab) counts as the first of four congregations he gathered that year. The state historical marker at the church calls it one of three Rice founded in 1784 and the earliest of its denomination west of the Alleghenies; the congregation moved to its Main Street site in 1789.

Rice was also a teacher. The state marker at his Greensburg home (opens in a new tab) says he founded “Rice’s School,” or Transylvania (opens in a new tab) Seminary, near Danville in 1785, the school that grew into Transylvania University. He helped organize the Transylvania Presbytery and served as its first moderator, the church says, giving scattered frontier congregations their first governing body.

In 1792 he was a delegate to the convention at Danville that wrote Kentucky’s first constitution. There he argued for gradual emancipation in a speech printed as Slavery, Inconsistent with Justice and Good Policy, which ExploreKYHistory (opens in a new tab) describes as built mainly on religious principles. He also warned that slavery bred idleness and resentment, and his pamphlet appealed to settlers’ fears of both enslaved people and Native nations, the language of a frontier still at war.

The effort failed. Article IX of the 1792 constitution barred the legislature from freeing enslaved people without their owners’ consent or full payment, and Kentucky entered the Union as a slave state. Rice spent much of the rest of his life in the Kentucky Abolition Society, according to his Grokipedia biography, always on the minority side of the question.

He later moved to Green County. The church history dates the move to 1793, while the state marker says he came to the Greensburg area in 1798 and formed two churches there. He died in Green County in 1816, at about eighty-two, and was buried beside the Presbyterian church in Danville.

Kentucky today

State historical marker #844 stands beside 119 North Main Street in Greensburg, the Green County seat, marking Rice’s home. In Danville, marker #754 stands at the First Presbyterian Church at 500 West Main Street, the descendant of Concord Church, a few blocks from Constitution Square, where the 1792 convention met.