Tidence Lane was a Baptist minister. He served as pastor at the Bent Creek Baptist Church from 1785 to 1806.
Background
Tidence Lane was born near Baltimore, Maryland, the son of Richard and Sarah Lane. He was the great-grandson of Major Samuel Lane, an officer in the King's service, who was in Maryland as early as 1680; his paternal grandparents were Dutton and Pretitia (Tidings) Lane. At his christening he was given his grandmother's maiden name, Tidings, but in some way or other this was changed to Tidence. The Lanes were typical frontiersmen. They migrated first into Southwestern Virginia, then pushed down into the Yadkin River country, North Carolina.
Career
Sometime about 1754 Shubael Stearns, a Separate Baptist evangelist with all the zeal and methods of the New Light persuasion, came into what is now Randolph County, North Carolina, and established the Sandy Creek Church. What Lane's religious connections up to that time had been is not known except that he had been christened in St. Paul's Church, Baltimore. From what he had heard of Stearns, he had not formed a favorable impression of him, but curiosity led him to make a forty-mile journey to hear him. Stearns had a magnetic influence over his audiences and an eye that exerted almost magical power. He fixed it on Lane, and Lane succumbed. He tried to quit the place, but was drawn back. "Shunning him, " he said, "I could no more effect than a bird can shun a rattlesnake when it fixes its eyes upon it" (Burnett, post, p. 319).
Lane underwent a thorough conversion and was thereafter an effective Baptist preacher after the pattern of Stearns. The defeat of the Regulators at the battle of Alamance, 1771, led many of the North Carolinians to seek relief from oppression by pushing through the mountains into what is now eastern Tennessee. Among these were a considerable number of the Sandy Creek Church, who settled on Boone Creek, in the present county of Washington.
Lane went thither about 1776, and by 1779 at the latest had organized the recent comers into the Buffalo Ridge Baptist Church. A few years later he moved still farther westward and established himself on Bent Creek, near what would later be the town of Whitesburg, Hamblin County. Here with Rev. William Murphy he organized the Bent Creek Baptist Church in June 1785, which he served as pastor for the remainder of his life.
When the Holston Association was instituted in October, the first ecclesiastical association to be formed in Tennessee, Lane became its moderator.
Achievements
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
He is said to have been "much sought in counsel by the churches. He was not so hard in doctrine as some of his brethren, his doctrinal belief being a modified Calvinism" (Burnett, pp. 321-22)
Connections
In May 9, 1743, Tidence married Esther Bibbin (or Bibber). He had seven sons and two daughters. Four of the sons were in the battle of King's Mountain, three of them under Col. John Sevier.