(Webmaster's note: the genealogy given in this book is incorrect. It states that the line of descent from Col. Thomas Avent was as follows: Thomas Avent ==> John Avent ==> Thomas Avent ==> John Avent of Avent Ferry, Chatham Co., NC. The line should be: Thomas Avent ==>William Avent/wife Sarah Massie ==> John Avent of Avent Ferry, Chatham Co., NC. It also states that Col. Thomas Avent came to America in 1698, when he actually arrived here ca. 1701.)

The Lillington Mission: Part of Isaac Avent's work on the Buckhorn Circuit in 1878 as the junior preacher was put in at Lillington on his numerous trips to the county seat. No doubt he was well acquainted with the small band of Methodists who were already meeting there. Some semblance of an organized state was created out of the small group of believers in 1878 so that when the North Carolina Conference met for its annual session in November, the small sum of five dollars was reported contributed for "missions” in the name of the Lillington Mission. This report was given beside the name of Isaac Avent who was largely responsible for making this vital connection with the Methodist Conference.

The Avent story is an interesting one, but it does not begin in Harnett County with the Lillington Mission. Rather, it begins with Colonel Thomas Avent who was born in 1671 and came to America twenty-seven years later and settled in Surry County, Virginia.. Actual records exist which indicate that he was Justice of Sussex Court in 1753-1754 and that he sold land to Richard Moore in Sussex County. Colonel Thomas Avent had four sons and two daughters: John, Thomas, William, Peter, Mary and Sarah.

John and Thomas Avent were the first two sons of Colonel Thomas Avent and were born only a short time apart. Both lived in Sussex County and died before 1756 when their father, the first Avent in America, passed away. Thomas Avent left five daughters and, therefore, no namebearer. John Avent, dying at the unusual age of twenty-two left one son named Thomas, possibly in honor of Colonel Thomas Avent.

This Thomas Avent, grandson of Colonel Thomas Avent, also lived in Sussex County, Virginia. One of his children, born to his wife Rebecca, was named John Avent and John and his wife Mary, moved to Avent's Ferry, Chatham County, North Carolina. A conflicting opinion of the genealogy of the Avent line indicates that Colonel Thomas Avent's son, Thomas, was the father of the John Avent who moved to Chatham County, but the early death of Thomas, who left five daughters his property through his will without naming any sons, makes this delineation unlikely. An interesting sidelight is that Thomas Avent, Jr., died before his father, Colonel Thomas Avent, died.

When John Avent died in Chatham County in 1821, he bequeathed to his son, William Avent, "one Negro man named Pompey and a Negro woman named Sal and one colt and all my stock hogs."  This William Avent was born in 1775 and became a minister in the Methodist itinerancy. Admitted on trial in the Virginia Conference in 1789, the Rev. William Avent was appointed to Richmond as the "second man" on the charge. The following year it was Burke and Augusta, serving alone. In 1801 he was admitted into full connection and appointed to Santee and Catawba in the South Carolina Conference as "second man." The record of his ministry cannot be traced each year, but his name appears again in the Conference appointments in January 1, 1803, when the South Carolina Conference met and assigned William Jones and William Avent to the Bladen Circuit. At that time the membership of that vast Cape Fear Valley appointment numbered 63 white and 418 colored members. Apparently this was a severe test of endurance for Avent was ordained in 1804 only to locate the following year. It does not appear that he had any regular preaching appointment after 1805. He died in 1841 and was buried in a grave on his farm by the Cape Fear River near Corinth, but his tombstone has since been preserved and placed on display in a glass case in the vestibule of Buckhorn Church in Chatham County.

The Rev. William Avent had two very tragic marriages. Silva Drake, his first wife, died in 1805 at twenty-three years of age after a marriage which lasted only five years. This early death may have had something to do with his giving up the itinerant ministry early in his career. Being away from the woman he loved and had chosen for a mate, he had given most of his time to extended preaching tours. And then to suddenly lose Silva in the forenoon of life was perhaps more than this thirty year old energetic and youthful minister could bear. He would try to be a better husband the next time and gave his time to courting once again. This time Martha Hill Hicks became his second wife in 1807, and she died two years later at twenty-four years of age. Fever from malaria-carrying mosquitoes common to the river bottom may have been the cause, for his home was on the Cape Fear River near Buckhorn Creek.  In the third marriage of the Rev. William Avent, he was united with Esther Watts Clegg (1791-1858) whose family lived in Virginia. She had a Welsh grandfather and was considered to come from pure English aristocracy. This marriage was performed in 1812 after the Clegg family had lived in North Carolina twenty-one years. One of thirteen children herself, Esther Watts Avent bore her good husband a dozen children. The seventh child was born on September 9, 1825, and was given the family name, Isaac Watts Avent. After living a full life and rearing a large family, Esther W. Avent passed away to her heavenly reward on January 2, 1858. Her funeral at old Buckhorn Church was the first one held on the newly formed Buckhorn Circuit by Washington S. Chaffin, the first pastor of the circuit, on Sunday, January 3, 1858.

The very pious influence of Isaac Avent's parents no doubt impressed the young boy with the need of a Saviour whom he sought and found at ten years of age. He was converted at the old Buckhorn Church and was placed at the head of a class while he was still in his teens. His father's house was a favorite lodging place for the early Methodist circuit riders. As a young lad, Isaac prepared his head and heart to lay a firm foundation for a life of usefulness in God's service. He had two brothers, Joseph and William, who also became Methodist ministers, but they both moved to other states. Isaac Avent was appointed to the Lillington Mission as its first pastor at the Annual Conference session in Charlotte in 1878. The same Bishop George F. Pierce issued this assignment who had laid his hands on the minister's head in ordination twenty-one years before. Now Avent was fifty-five years old and had served small circuits and missions from the mountains to the seacoast.

Isaac Avent made his home five miles south of Cokesbury Methodist Church, on the left side of the old "River Road" as one moves away from the church. Only a few bricks and foundation stones remain to bear witness to the grand preacher's homeplace which has long since been demolished. Across the road from his place is a trail which led to the main road to the river and to Northington's Ferry pronounced "Narrington's" by the local folk. This was the way to go to Chapel Hill and upstate from Fayetteville. It was a much traveled road.

It doesn't take much imagination today to hear the shouts of the operator of the flat, the neighing of the horses snorting and straining to pull up the steep hill from the river, and the melodious singing and unceasing chatter of children packed on the wagons with the family's supplies. One can still hear it all in the silence of the woods and can still see the impressions of wear on the rocky ground hid by ferns and leaves. Those marks of bygone years have not even surrendered to abandonment but still remain. Around it all Isaac Avent had a large farm and a grist mill.

The mill located on Mill Creek which cut across Avent's property was used to grind corn and wheat. The creek fell rapidly over the water-wheel and the rocky slopes and dashed into the river. Occasional ponds furnished water holes for the stock and delighted the fishermen. Avent liked to walk over his fields in his old age and be with the men and boys who worked his land almost as much as he loved to eat blackberry pie. Hired hands helped raise his wheat and oats, cutting the grain with an old-fashioned cradle. But at night, after the work was over, it was his usual custom to call his hands in and with eyes growing steadily dimmer with age, read from his Bible, exhort a little, and pray. A. Y. Tudor, who was born in 1872, recalls these good times and enjoyed recounting them to the writer when as a young man he worked for Isaac Avent.

On Sunday his custom was to put on his dark suit and white silk vest and cap his paling reddish hair with a broad brimmed hat and walk five miles to Cokesbury Church if he wasn't preaching somewhere else that day. He was a stout, low man in stature; his ragged beard bespoke of age and wisdom yet unknown to those who had not tried life and tempered it with faith and religion. Isaac Avent married twice. His first wife was Temperance Rollins, known to friends and neighbors as "Aunt Tempie." His second marriage came very late in life after Aunt Tempie died and he married Miss Chloe H. Pegram  (1844-1904), daughter of George W. Pegram of the Cokesbury Community, who was twenty years younger than Isaac. She survived him on January 18, 1900, when he died and was buried in the Cokesbury Church Cemetery. His last sermon was preached at a "protracted meeting" at Cokesbury Church in 1899 when he so ably presented Jesus Christ as a personal saviour that at the invitation a young lady came forth to the altar and was converted. Confined to his room for only a week before he died, Avent was seemingly unconscious when his strong spirit slipped from his frail body and glided into God's safe haven. In his lifetime Isaac Avent gave a thousand dollars to Trinity College, (now Duke University) and upon his death he willed his library to the same institution. He provided a home and land for his wife, and a home on a six acre site and a sixty-nine acre farm for his adopted son, Edgar M. Blanchard, not having any natural children of his own. The fourth revision of his will was to "give and devise at the death of my wife (that) the whole of my personal and real property left be turned into money or good bonds and delivered into the hands of the Trustees of the North Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, and that the Trustees shall keep it at interest in perpetuity, collecting the interest annually and to divide the interest equally between the missionary and educational causes of North Carolina Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South."

Isaac Avent loved his church and gave the strength of his life it while he lived and his estate to it when he died after which his personal effects were not worth one hundred dollars. The Rev. W. A. Cade, longtime member of the North Carolina Conference and native of the Cokesbury Community, remembered Isaac Avent from a boyhood recollection. On one occasion he was standing at the pulpit in Cokesbury Church, an aged man, when he lifted up his hands in praise toward the ceiling and said, "I think I see the heavenly country just a little way ahead—just over there—and I'll soon be there." Cade said that he was a good man, and the impression he made upon the community was that he was without blemish. This is an example of the spirit and dedication that made the church great. Something of this past still haunts us and challenges us to put our hands to the plow and do the best that we can.

Franklin Grill, “Methodism in the Upper Cape Fear Valley ”, The Parthenon Press, 1966.  

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