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Palestine Baptist Church. Organized in 1842, it was and is still located on the part of the Old River Road that is now the back road between Picayune and Nicholson. Elder William Henry Varnado (1804-1893) came into this area about 1840, preaching in settler's houses, under brush arbors and trees. Thomas Jeremiah Stockstill had homesteaded a large tract of land there near the River Road, and he and his family were hosts to the meeting that organized Palestine Baptist Church. Elders Varnado and Calvin Meqehee organized the tiny congregation with seven charter members.#
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(	T. J. Stockstill and his wife,	Harriet	Warden Stockstill; Joshua
' j	Stockstill and his wife, Emily	Varnado	Stickstill; John Penton and
'	his wife; and "Preacher Billy"	Varnado	himself.34
Other Baptist Churches were organized in short order; Bethel at Riceville in 1846 (now extinct), El^n near Shieldsborough about 1847 (now extinct), Union at Caesa in 1852, Gainesville in 1855 (relocated in 1888 as Corinth at Turtleskin), Juniper Grove southeast of the site of Poplarville in 1855, Zion Hill at Pinetucky (now Henleyfield) in 1856 (but moved to a site east of McNeill after 1866) , and Salem in south central Hancock County in 1856 (absorbed by Palestine about 1871). In 1856 these eight small churches formed the Hobolochitto Baptist Association with a total of 266 members, led by the parent, Palestine, with 78. Pine Grove at Yamacraw (later called Industrial) was organized in 1865 at the Civil War's end, where there is a grave there of a young local Confederate soldier whose father brought his body back from one of the battlefields or hospitals to bury him at home. The Gainesville congregation shared a building, or union church, with the Methodists there in 1857. Several of these churches admitted black members before the Civil War, and Elder James Patton Johnston took Elder Jack, a Choctaw preacher, to Devil's Swamp at the mouth of the Pearl River to minister to the