William Sharpe was a member of the Fourth Creek Presbyterian Church which originally began as a log setting between two trees. The location of the first Fourth Creek Meeting house was just behind the library where Gordon’s Furniture now sits. The Fourth Creek Cemetery sits up the hill across from Gordon’s surrounded by a rock wall.
The Old Fourth Creek Congregation began sometime between 1750 and 1753. By 1753 it had grown into a well-defined congregation. In 1773 the members of Fourth Creek asked the North Carolina Presbytery (Orange) to set new bounds for them so they might have three congregations. William Sharpe used his surveying skills to draw a meet showing the Meeting House near the center and then the locations of all the families living around the church going out in an eleven-mile radius in each direction.
The purpose in creating the map was to show that two more churches, Concord (Loray) and Bethany needed to be built so members would not have to travel such a great distance to go to church. In each quadrant of the map the names of the people living around the church is shown, demonstrating how the formation of the new churches would better serve the whole congregation. The map bears the names of 196 families, many of whom were the first settlers of what was then Rowan County.
