| Notes |
- Elders James Brinson & Arthur McFarland, Alexander F. Nelson, and Christopher Koonce
Baptist minister James Brinson and his wife Patience Elizabeth Purser, together with their daughter Holland and her husband Arthur McFarland, arrived in the Upper Pine Hills shortly before 1820 from Wilson County Tennessee. Accompanying them were Brinson's brother-in-law, Alexander F. Nelson, and son-in-law, Christopher Koonce. Together with the Honeycutts and Farmers, these Tennessee newcomers founded the Pine Hills Baptist Church in the Upper Pine Hills, in the vicinity of modern Vienna and Downsville. Brinson preached the first documented Baptist sermons in the Ouachita Valley, and he ordained his son-in-law, Arthur McFarland, soon after arriving in Louisiana. Brinson established churches across northwestern Louisiana in the 1820s, including many in modern Claiborne and Webster Parishes. In addition, he became active in the Louisiana Baptist Association in the early 1820s after his church joined that body. The delegates elected him as the moderator of the 1827 Associational Meeting held near Minden at the Black Lake Church that Brinson had helped to found a few years earlier. When they first arrived in Louisiana from Tennessee, Brinson, McFarland, Nelson, and Koonce first settled in the Upper Pine Hills, on the upper reaches of the waters of Bayou d'Arbonne near Vienna and Downsville. By 1826, Brinson had temporarily moved to Natchitoches Parish, leaving McFarland in Ouachita. By 1830, Brinson, McFarland, Nelson, and Koonce moved into the far reaches of Bayou d'Arbonne into Claiborne Parish, where Brinson died on 5 September 1831. In November 1832, Arthur McFarland, Haywood Alford, and John Impson served as ministers of Pine Hills Baptist Church. McFarland continued his ministry in Claiborne Parish until sometime after 1860 [20].
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