Edmund Botsford 

Edmund Botsford (1745-1819) was born in Woburn, Bedfordshire, and grew up in the local Baptist church. In 1765 he immigrated to Charleston, South Carolina, and was baptized into the Baptist church there in March 1767. In 1769 he began studying for the ministry, receiving his license to preach in 1771. He ministered to a group of Baptists at Tuckseeking, Georgia (about 40 miles from Savannah), and was ordained by the Charleston church in March 1772, but by the end of 1772 he had left Tuckseeking. At that time Botsford and Daniel Marshall were the only two ordained Baptist ministers in Georgia. In 1773 he organized a Baptist church in Burke County, Georgia, the second Baptist church to be established in that state. He ministered there until 1779, when he returned to South Carolina as a result of the British control of Georgia during the Revolutionary War (Botsford, like most Baptists in America, was a strong supporter of the American cause). He soon became minister of the Baptist church at Welsh Neck in Orange County, South Carolina, a part of the Bethel Baptist Association. In 1780, however, he was forced to flee once again, this time to Virginia, returning to South Carolina in December 1781. While ministering at Welsh Neck, he began preaching often in Charleston, rebuilding the pastorless church there. In 1786 the church was restored to a sufficient capacity to call Richard Furman as pastor. Botsford’s congregation at Welsh Neck was a large one, numbering some 167 members in 1790, according to John Asplund. Botsford corresponded with a number of English Baptists, sending Sutcliff an account of his wife’s death in 1790 and of his church’s efforts in joining with Sutcliff and the English Baptists in forming a regular monthly prayer meeting (Botsford’s sister married a Mr. Hinton of Upton, a relation of James Hinton, Baptist minister at Oxford). See John Asplund, The Annual Register of the Baptist Denomination, in North-America; to the First of November, 1790 (Southampton County VA:  J. Asplund, 1791), 43; John Rippon, ed., Baptist Annual Register, vol. 1 (1790-93), 104-108; Charles D. Mallary, Memoirs of Elder Edmund Botsford (Charleston: W. Riley, 1832); also James Hinton to Edmund Botsford, 8 November 1787 (MS., copy at Bristol Baptist College, Misc. Letters, G96, Box 7).