Long before strip malls and traffic, Carpenter’s Creek was a lifeline and a lifeway for Pensacola’s Black community. Along its banks in Brent, Jennie Cooper Hudgins—born into freedom in 1865—built a modest homestead that became a personal and shared sanctuary of work, worship, and recreation. She washed White families’ laundry in the creek and, with her neighbors, raised crops and livestock on the 10 acres she and her husband Fred owned, which were deeded in her name upon his death.
Out of that ground, Jennie and Pastor Will Young founded New Hope Baptist Church in 1922, under a simple brush arbor of poles and palmetto fronds. Earlier this month, on March 8— International Women’s Day—New Hope members gathered to celebrate the Church’s 104th anniversary.
For decades, “Mother Hudgins” walked the red-clay roads between Brent and Goulding, knocking on doors to raise small donations for a permanent church. On the first Sunday of each month, New Hope’s members carried robes and towels down to “Mother Hudgins’ Creek,” where hundreds of people were baptized in the cool spring-fed waters. This was during Jim Crow, when Black Pensacolians were steered to industrial sites like Bruce Beach and shut out of most safe waterfronts. Carpenter’s Creek, by contrast, offered not only clean water and shade, but a rare landscape of dignity—created, owned, and stewarded by a Black woman and her family…