During the American Civil War, one of the Baptist church buildings in northeast Tennessee, Mossy Creek, was "irreparably damaged. Troops were quartered near this church at different times during the war. A soldier in the Eleventh New Hampshire Regiment, who was at Mossy Creek during February, 1864, recorded the treatment that had been given the church’s facilities by the invading armies. He wrote:

At this place there was a low, one-story brick church, of the Baptist faith, and upon the desk there lay a large old-fashioned Bible, upon the fly leaf of which was written, ‘The Property of the Mossy Creek Baptist Church.’ Although the building had been deprived of everything combustible, yet within its walls were that desk and that Bible. The doors and windows were gone, but the Bible remained unmolested by both the armies which had passed through the little village. It was kept in a little box with a cover to it."