THE HEROIC WOMEN OF EARLY INDIANA METHODISM
BY
THOMAS AIKEN GOODWIN
“Arms and the man, I
sing,” said the great Virgil, thousands of years
ago, and all the little Virgils have been singing the
man ever since. But who ever sings the woman?
Occasionally a Debora or a Joan of Arc, a kind of
a female monstrosity, comes to the front and receives
recognition, but their conspicuousness is due more
to the low level of their surroundings, than to their
individual pre-eminence. They were out of their
spheres in what gave them notoriety, and they have
been so voted by universal consent through the ages.
It was not specially to their credit that they successfully
commanded armies, but it was to the unutterable shame
of the men of their period that they had to, or let
it go undone. No thanks to Betsey for killing
the bear. She had to, or the bear would have
killed the baby, but everlasting shame upon her worthless
husband for making it necessary for her to do what
he ought to have done. Betsey was out of her
sphere when killing the bear, and so was the cowardly
man when letting her do it.
The great Virgil graciously introduces
a Dido into his song, but he does it apologetically,
and only because it was necessary in order to make
a love story out of it, and all the little Virgils all
the writers of love stories from that day to this have
treated her in literature as if she were indispensable
to point a moral or to adorn a tale, and really fit
for little else that it was her mission
to love and be loved, all of which was easy enough
on her part; and that, having filled this mission,
she ought to be happy and die contented, and to be
held in everlasting remembrance. This outrage
upon woman’s rights and woman’s worth
has been carried so far that it has become common to
assume that it is her prerogative to monopolize the
love of the household at least to possess
and manage the greater part of it; and some women have
heard this so often that they more than half believe
it themselves, so that from away back men, and even
some women, talk of a woman’s love as being
a little purer and a great deal stronger than a man’s
love. There is not a word of truth in it.
It is one of the unfounded legends which have descended
through the ages, transmitted from father to son, while
the mothers and daughters, all unconscious of the
great wrong they suffer by it, have never denied it.
It is not only false, but it is absurd. How could
it be true? A man is not lovable as a woman is.
How can she love him as he loves her, who is the personification
and incarnation of beauty and gentleness and sweetness?
That is, some are, for it must be conceded that woman
is like Jeremiah’s figs, the good are very, very
good, while the bad are very naughty too
bad for any use.
This wrong against woman has gone
even farther than that. In the battles of life,
however nobly she fights them, she receives no proper
recognition. The man who fights well is a hero,
but the woman who fights equally well, or even better,
is only a hero_ine_. I despise the word because
I detest the discrimination it implies. We do
not call the devout Christian woman a saintess, nor
the eloquent woman an oratrix, but the woman who excels
in endurance and bravery and in the virtues that constitute
a man a hero, is only a hero_ine_, as if heroism was
a manly virtue, to which woman may lay no claim.
I long ago expunged it from my vocabulary. It
is entirely too femin_ine_ for me. Out upon such
unjust discrimination!
This long and rather prosy introduction
brings me to the theme of the evening woman
the greater hero in early Indiana Methodism.
You have often heard of the sacrifices
and toils of the pioneer preachers. Those sacrifices
and toils were great, yet many of them were of the
character of those made by a young preacher in the
Western Conference about the beginning of this century.
In one of his journeys alone, over the Cumberland
Mountains, Bishop Asbury lost his way, and night coming
on, he was about to dismount and prepare to sleep out,
when he was met by a young man, a hunter, who took
the tired bishop to his father’s cabin and extended
to the stranger the best accommodations that home
in the wilderness afforded. The bishop, true to
his calling, preached to the family and left an appointment
for the preacher on that circuit, who soon organized
a class of mountaineers, with the bishop’s guide
as class leader. In a short time he became a local
preacher, and soon after, he was admitted into the
Western Conference. A few years later at a session
of the Conference, he was guest at the same house
with the bishop, and while the bishop was engaged in
writing, he was engaged in telling the young lady
of the house how many sacrifices the itinerant had
to make for the church and for Christ. In spite
of his powers of abstraction, the bishop heard the
preacher’s story, and turning from the table,
he said: “Yes, Benjamin, I can testify to
the sacrifices you have made for the church.
There never was a more hospitable home in the Cumberland
Mountains than that you left to become an itinerant.
I never slept better in my life than I slept on that
bed of bear skins in your father’s cabin.
It was such a contrast with the accommodations I was
about to prepare for in the woods alone, that I have
never forgotten it and that corn bread baked
in the ashes! And that venison! And, Benjamin,
you have sacrificed all this for the church!
You could not sacrifice more, for it was all you had
to sacrifice a home in the mountains, a
good gun, and a hunter’s life all
for the itineracy.”
And such were the sacrifices that
many of the heroes made, whose fame has come down
to us. They never lived as well before, never
dressed as well nor fed as well, and yet their fare
was not always sumptuous, nor their garments of purple
and fine linen, but both food and clothing were better
than the average of those to whom they preached.
The story of Allen Wiley is an oft told story.
We have heard of his large circuits and of his districts,
extending from the Ohio at Madison, to Fort Wayne,
embracing all of the present North Indiana Conference
and about one-half of the Southeast, requiring him
to be absent from home three months at a time; and
how he studied Latin and Greek and Hebrew on horseback,
or by the light of the settler’s fire, or of
an improvised lamp made of a saucer or scraped turnip
filled with hog’s lard, and with a rag for a
wick. But who was Allen Wiley to begin with?
What sacrifices did he make for the opportunity to
study Latin and Greek and Hebrew even under these
difficulties? He was an average farmer on a quarter
section of only medium land in Switzerland county,
living in a cabin two miles from any neighbor.
By the dint of hard work, chopping or plowing by day,
and burning brush, or husking corn, or making splint
brooms, or pounding hominy, by night, he was succeeding
in feeding his wife and Five children, and in adding
a few additional acres to his cleared land every year;
studying English grammar by taking his book to the
field when plowing, or to the woods when chopping;
and preaching acceptably as a local preacher in his
own cabin, or in some neighboring cabin, on Sundays.
Did it require any great heroism to exchange all these
for the less laborious but more conspicuous calling
of a traveling preacher, uninviting as that calling
was at that period, yet furnishing opportunities for
mental improvement such as his soul longed for?
Nay, rather, was not he the greater hero who remained
among the untitled and comparatively unknown laymen,
and faithfully discharged the duties of a layman,
unsupported by the up-bearing pressure which comes
of fame? Allen Wiley sacrificed the hardships
of a frontier farmer, with its huskings and log-rollings
and house-raisings, for the position of a traveling
preacher, with its opportunities to study and with
the best entertainment that the country afforded.
But what of that wife whom he left in that cabin,
two miles from any neighbor, with five small children,
not one of whom was old enough to render any aid toward
the support of the family? And it was not grudgingly
nor of constraint that she gave him up to the work
of the ministry; but, on the contrary, knowing the
desire of his heart to be wholly devoted to the ministry,
she long prayed that a door might be opened to him,
so that when he consented to go into the work, if
his wife would consent, he was cheered onward from
the first by her God-speed and prayers. Leaving
the heroic husband, the growing and popular preacher,
to travel long journeys, to preach to large congregations
and to be caressed everywhere by loving and admiring
friends, pursuing congenial studies under more favorable
surroundings than his farm ever could have afforded,
let us look in upon that heroic wife with her family
of five children, increased ultimately to ten, and
for many years almost wholly unaided by the presence
or counsel of the husband, or by any considerable
material aid from him. It was hers, there alone
on that farm, not only to spin, and weave, and make,
and mend, and cook, and wash for those children, but
to train them for the church and for God. Was
not she the greater hero of the two? Did not
the patient endurance, which for years added new acres
to the fields, as well as new children to the family,
call into exercise the very highest qualities of heroism?
Her door was not only always open to the wayfaring
preacher, but her cabin, and later her larger frame
house, was the neighborhood chapel, until, with very
little help from her neighbors, she built a log chapel
on her own farm for the accommodation of the church
which was in her own house; and such was her fidelity
and her ability as well, that those children all became
religious, and three of them became able ministers
of the gospel, one of them serving long and well as
a professor in this university. Meanwhile she
took an active part in every social enterprise of
the times in the neighborhood. She attended quilting
bees in the neighborhood and had them in her own cabin,
and she was a ministering angel at the bedside of the
sick and the dying; so taking the lead in the early
temperance work, that she was the first one who dared
to have a company of neighbor women without the inevitable
punch and toddy. We need not detract one iota
from the well-earned laurels of that great and good
man, to say that the greater hero of the twain was
that faithful, uncomplaining wife: and that, great
as were his labors, hers were much greater, and all
the more heroic because they were unobserved and unapplauded.
If heroism consists in “the braving of difficulties
with a noble devotion to some great cause, and a just
confidence of being able to meet dangers in the spirit
of such a cause,” then was Mrs. Allen Wiley
a hero second to none.
George K. Hester is a name much reverenced
among early Indiana preachers. Beginning only
a few years later than Wiley, his manner of life was
substantially the same as Wiley’s large
circuits, long rides and hard fare. He, too,
was a hero. But what of that young wife, about
to become a mother, who sent him with a wife’s
blessing to a distant circuit, not only large in extent,
but embracing the hills of Crawford county and a strip
along the Ohio river of nearly two hundred miles in
length, inhabited by the poorest and roughest of the
pioneer classes? If he was a hero to undertake
such a sacrifice, what shall we call that young wife,
who gave birth to her first-born during his absence,
and after a few months of budding promise, during
which mother-love was strongly developed, buried that
child, all unsupported by the presence and sympathy
of her husband; and yet, near the close of the year,
when his heart began to fail and he thought of ceasing
to travel, wrote to the fainting hero: “Greatly
as I would rejoice if I thought you could live a located
life, yet, if you can not feel clear in staying at
home, and if you believe you would not be as useful
as when traveling, notwithstanding the gloominess
of our situation, I can not say stay. I know
very well there is no earthly enjoyment for me where
you do not participate; so, when you are absent, I
do not look for any real happiness, whether my situation
be comfortable or not. Yet I well know I can
not enjoy happiness with you, except in the way of
duty; therefore, my dear, consult your situation,
consult your feelings, but above all, consult your
God. Let His holy spirit be your counselor, and
I will endeavor to submit.” Then, alluding
to the very meager support the circuit had given less
than ten dollars in all for the year she
adds: “If you should conclude to quit the
connection this year, I should be well pleased if
you would not receive anything from the circuit, but
let it be for those of our brethren who shall continue
to travel.” Heroic little school teacher!
What did she care for a trifle like quarterage while
she was able to support both herself and her husband?
Of course George K. Hester did not locate after receiving
that letter, and he left the quarterage for those
to follow. Whether they got it or not is not
now known.
The next year we find her in a cabin
in Jennings county, teaching school for her own support
and the support of her heroic husband, and giving
birth to her second son, the now venerable and talented
Dr. F. A. Hester, of the Southeast Indiana Conference.
George K. Hester was a great and heroic
man, not only when traveling large circuits with little
pay, but during a long life, in which he was even
more heroic as a faithful local preacher, with no pay
at all. But, tested by any human standard, that
gifted and devoted wife exhibited more of the stuff
that heroes are made of, than he ever had occasion
to show. That he did a father’s part well,
none will deny, but it was chiefly the mother’s
hand that so trained that family of six boys that
four of them became eminent and useful preachers, while
the mother of the Bovard family of preachers always
owned her as her spiritual mother and guide.
Ah, Bene Hester was a hero!
A little later, but on the Wabash instead of on the Ohio, Daniel DeMotte
became a hero. He traveled large circuits, preached well, prayed well and
worked well. But, after all, who was Daniel DeMotte to begin with? A
fair tailor at the first, then a medium farmer, with all that being a farmer
meant on the Wabash sixty years ago. But he sacrificed all that to become
a traveling preacher. As a preacher he was faithful and laborious, but he
never worked harder or, personally, he never fared harder as a preacher than he
did as a farmer, while his sorest trials as a preacher were always alleviated by
attentions that amounted in many cases almost to adoration. But what of
his heroic wife and those eight children, some of them strapping boys, and,
judging from the way they turned out, they were not spoiled by a disregard of
Solomons directions as to boy culture. Of her descendants there are more
than sixty grand-children, and more than twenty of these are either preachers,
teachers or doctors, two being missionaries in China. Of only one is there
any occasion for the family to blush at the mention of his name. One, the
youngest of the eight, and who promised as well in boyhood as any of them, was
in his early manhood sent to Congress,
and he was a member of that fool Indiana Senate last
winter.
Let me not be understood as detracting
one jot from the well deserved fame of Daniel DeMotte.
He was a hero among heroes fifty years ago. His
circuits were large and his salaries small, but that
wife, that mother, was the chief of heroes. Bishop
Bowman well said of her at her funeral: “She
was a woman of no ordinary character, full of faith,
patient, quiet, cheerful, happy.”
Edwin Ray, though he died young, was
a great hero. Eloquent, energetic and educated,
he was second to none in everything which constituted
a real hero. But when Sally Nolan, the belle
of young Indianapolis, the tavern keeper’s daughter,
consented, at his request, to exchange her leadership
of fashionable society in Indianapolis for the lot
of an itinerant’s wife, and to ride with him
from Indianapolis to Madison on horseback to enter
upon her life work, she showed a greater heroism than
Edwin Ray ever did in his whole life; and when later
she became his strengthening angel, when poverty and
actual want stared them in the face, ministering by
her heroic words when his own strong heart failed,
and with her own hands making calash bonnets for her
neighbors to prevent actual starvation, she became
by far the more heroic of the two, displaying a heroism
which is not one whit abated as she waits for the
summons to call her from labor to reward.
Joseph Tarkington was a hero, but
when Maria Slawson, that was, mounted her horse with
her bridal outfit on her back and in her saddle-bags
for a bridal tour from Switzerland county to Monroe,
through the hills of Brown county when
she rode all day in the rain, and sat up all night
in a salt boiler’s shanty with nothing to eat
but one biscuit in twenty-four hours, she displayed
the material that heroes are made of, and yet there
were many experiences no less trying than this, for
that heroic woman to pass through in those days such
as her heroic husband never had to encounter.
Henry S. Talbott was one of the best
preachers of his period, and one of the most heroic.
Unlike most of his contemporaries he left a lucrative
and promising business when he entered the traveling
connection. He was a physician with a profitable
practice and a promising future when he heroically
forsook all for the special privations of an itinerant’s
life as it was sixty years ago, and he heroically
discharged the duties of the calling for nearly a
half century. But what of that wife, left almost
alone much of her time, with the cares and responsibilities
of ten children upon her hands? A section of
her experience, and the fortitude with which she bore
it, would read like a fairy tale to this generation,
and she yet lives to bless her household and the world
with the sweetness of sanctified heroism.
And what is true of these is true
of the whole family of preachers’ wives of that
heroic period of Methodism. They were called to
endure the greater hardships and to bear the greater
burdens, and they bore them heroically. The husband
in his rounds may sometimes have had to share with
his people in their destitution, but, personally they
shared also in their abundance. The best bed
in the best cabin of the settler was at his command,
and the best food of the fattest larder of the neighborhood
was set before him, and this was often both abundant
and luxurious. Besides this, he was the centre
of a large social influence, receiving attentions
and admirations which greatly alleviated every discomfort,
while the wife was often alone in a remote cabin, or
at best in such a house as happened to be unoccupied
in some half-deserted village, and could be rented
cheap for a parsonage. There she was surrounded
by her family of half-fed and half-clothed children,
with none of the alleviations which made her husband’s
life not only bearable but often enjoyable. It
is no exaggeration to say that the wives of our early
preachers often suffered for want of nourishing food,
while, when on his circuit, the husband had abundance.
Besides this there was the absence of almost every
domestic and social comfort which the annual and long
moves necessarily implied, and yet in mentioning the
heroes of early Methodism in Indiana these are seldom
referred to. They were in all cases the greater
heroes.
But these heroic wives and their heroic
husbands were not the only heroes of that period,
nor the greatest. We are so accustomed to sing
praises to those who are conspicuous because of accidental
position, that we fail to remember that in the humblest
private in the ranks is often to be found every element
that constitutes the real hero, and who is all the
more worthy of recognition because never recognized.
Allen Wiley was never as great a hero in his after
life as he was those years in which he added the unrequited
labors of a faithful and laborious local preacher
to the work of a diligent farmer. He became more
conspicuous but never greater.
Among the real heroes of that heroic
period were the Culls, the Conwells, the Bariwicks,
the Swartzes, the Brentons, the Morrows, and hundreds
like them, who did not merely supplement the labors
of the traveling preachers, but who often led the
way. Three-fourths of the early societies in
Indiana were organized by local preachers, a class
of heroic men who never figured in Conferences, and
whose names are not mentioned among the heroes of
the period, but who, on the contrary, were often held
in light esteem by their traveling contemporaries because
they were not in the regular work, though often in
labors quite as abundant as the most laborious of
these. As she is the greatest of heroes as well
as the best of wives who faithfully discharges the
duties of a step-mother, under the burning criticisms
of intermeddlers, not to mention the too frequent
ingratitude of the immediate beneficiaries of her
care, so the local preacher who is faithful to his
calling, notwithstanding unfriendly criticisms and
conspicuous ingratitude, is to be ranked as the greatest
of heroes. And of such there were many in the
early years of Indiana Methodism.
But even these were not the greatest
heroes of early Indiana Methodism. The exigencies
of the period developed a class of heroes without whose
part the labors of the Wileys, the Stranges and the
Armstrongs could not have been any more than
the achievements of the Grants and the Shermans and
the Washingtons in the military could have been without
the burden-bearings of the heroic private soldier.
Was it nothing heroic to open the cabin of the settler
for preaching, month after month, for years, and not
merely to prepare it for the meeting, but to put it
in living order after the meeting was over, and then
to feed the preacher, and often a half dozen neighbors
who were always ready to accept a half invitation
to dine with the preacher, without ever suggesting
that a good way to enjoy that luxury would be to invite
the preacher to eat at their own table? And yet
the men who did this year after year are hardly mentioned,
even as an appreciable force in the history of early
Methodism, much less as heroes of no low grade.
The preacher who preached in that cabin and ate at
that table has been duly canonized, but the man who
made that preaching possible at a sacrifice of time
and money, and of domestic comfort which money can
not measure, has generally been regarded as under
unspeakable obligations to the preacher and to his
neighbors for being counted worthy to do and to suffer
such things for the church. But the demands upon
these for heroic living did not cease with the removal
of the preaching from their cabins to the school house,
or to the church when built. To the end of their
lives their houses and barns were always open to Methodist
preachers, whether they were their pastors or were
strangers. It was sufficient that they came in
the name of a Methodist preacher. These heroes
were not always the richest men of their several neighborhoods,
nor of the church, but, honoring God with their substance
they not only prospered in worldly goods, but as a
rule they gave to the church and to the world a race
of stalwart Christian men and women, who, following
in the footsteps of their fathers, felt it a pleasure
to do for the church. Three-fourths of the early
students of this University came from homes that had
been open to the early traveling preachers, and the
generation of preachers and the preachers’ wives
just passing away was recruited almost wholly from
them, and the later generations of students and preachers,
and preachers’ wives, not to mention the men
who are foremost in all honorable callings, are largely
the grand-children and great-grand-children of these
same devoted heroic men.
Indelibly engraven upon the tablet
of my memory is one such cabin, which in many respects
represents hundreds. In 1840, among the hills
of Dearborn county, on my first round on the Rising
Sun circuit, I preached at it. The congregation
was composed of primitive country people, mostly dressed
in homespun. I had never seen one of them before,
but the entire class had turned out to hear the new
boy preacher, filling every chair, even the one behind
which I was to stand, and every bench that had been
provided was full, and the sides of each of the two
beds in the room, and some were standing. Among
these was a gawky youth, about twenty years of age,
green that is, immature in appearance,
and dressed in store clothes. I noticed that
after meeting, with a great many others, he stayed
to dinner. Later on I learned that he was a son
of the heroic man and woman whose house had been open
for years for preaching and for the entertainment
of preachers, and that he was at that time studying
law in Wilmington, which accounted for his wearing
store clothes. Years passed, and that green boy
ripened and developed, and he went out into the world
to become a Circuit Judge, a State Senator, a Supreme
Judge, and he has been for nine years the honored
Dean of the School of Law in De Pauw University.
But the opening of their doors for
preaching was not all. Sometimes these same heroes
would entertain an entire quarterly meeting, and a
great part of a camp-meeting when it was expected that
tent-holders would feed all who were not tent-holders.
Was not he a hero who would, year after year, not
merely kill the fatted calf for a quarterly or camp-meeting,
but the yearling, and provide as liberally of other
things required for entertaining the guests and their
horses, and yet keep open house, day and night, for
the gratuitous entertainment of preachers? No
traveling preacher ever displayed greater heroism than
these truly great men, and yet they were not the greatest
heroes of that heroic age. Such sacrifices as
they made from year to year are not to be lightly
esteemed, yet the supplying of the larder and of the
crib was the smallest part of the sacrifice required
for such an offering to the Lord. Was the cooking
for twenty to fifty at a quarterly or camp-meeting,
or the care of the guests whom the open house invited,
to be counted as second to any work done for the church?
Let it be borne in mind that these demands were made
before the introduction of cooking stoves and other
appliances for making housekeeping easy. The meals
for those quarterly meetings were cooked by the open
fireplace, before and over a huge log fire, often
without the aid even of a crane, and at the camp-meeting
by the side of a big log used as a kitchen. Looking
back through the years, and having been in position
to observe every type of church work, and every class
of church workers, from the early bishops on their
long horseback tours; and the early presiding elders,
going the rounds of their large districts; and the
early circuit riders, preaching twenty-five to thirty
times every four weeks, and traveling hundreds of
miles on each round; and the early local preachers,
with their gratuitous work, often without even thanks,
and the large-hearted men who not only contributed
of their substance toward the payment of salaries
and such benevolences as were then required, but who
provided liberally and cheerfully, also, for the entertainment
of these bishops, and elders, and preachers, I am
prepared to say that the very highest and purest type
of heroism ever displayed in early Methodism in Indiana
was shown by the women who set the tables and cooked
the food and prepared the beds for these wayfaring
men. And their name was legion. Every circuit
had one or more, though unavoidably and without rivalry
some one easily ranked all contemporaries of any given
neighborhood, and some, from position as well as real
merit, acquired almost a national reputation, so that
a strange preacher or a bishop would be directed,
when hundreds of miles distant, to what were known
as “Methodist taverns,” by the way.
The presiding elder, before leaving home for a series
of quarterly meetings, always mapped out his journey
with reference to these “taverns,” and
the retiring preacher gave a list of them to his successor
with the plan of his circuit, and a long horseback
journey to conference was always arranged so as to
strike one of these at or about noon or night, and
as they were not always located with reference to
such emergencies, this very often made an extra dinner
or extra supper, or an early or late breakfast, a
necessity, imposing an amount of extra labor upon
the generous housewife that few are now aware of,
and which tested her heroism as a face to face encounter
in battle tests the heroism of the soldier. To
call the roll of these heroes would be impossible,
yet some so stand out in the unwritten history of Indiana
Methodism that I can not avoid the mention of Mrs.
John Wilkins, of Indianapolis, whose hospitable door
was always open to the Methodist preachers of that
heroic period, whether they came as bishops, or elders,
or circuit riders, and her central position made her
house almost an open one. Mrs. Isaac Dunn, at
Lawrenceburg; Mrs. Caleb A. Craft, at Rising Sun;
Mrs. Charles Basnett, at Madison, and Mrs. Roland
T. Carr, at Rushville. But I can not name them
all. There were thousands of them. They
bore the very heaviest burdens of their times; and
yet, outside of the little family circle that knew
what was involved in their toils and sacrifices, no
one ever seemed to care for them or sympathize with
them. The men who received these hospitalities
were rated as the heroes, while what these women did
or suffered was counted of little worth, or certainly
only as commonplace; yet they were the greater heroes
by far, if for no other reason, yet, because their
labors were even harder than the labors of others,
and quite as essential to results, and wholly without
compensation even the moral compensation
which comes from realizing that the eyes of approbation
are upon you the only eye that seemed to
see them was the eye of the Father in Heaven.
It took the stuff that heroes are made of to endure
all this, yet they endured it for years and until
the necessity for such service had passed.
Merely as a specimen of this line
of service, let me lift the curtain and introduce
you to the inner life of one of these heroes as I knew
it for fifty years or more. We are familiar with
the deeds of those who have been voted the heroes
of early Methodism, but no one has ever told what
were the sacrifices and hardships of the heroic women,
whose time and strength were devoted to the same cause,
in a less conspicuous way.
While Indiana was yet a Territory,
and her one-roomed house, with a half-story above,
was yet unfinished, and while the Indian reservation,
yet inhabited by the Delawares, was less than two miles
distant, and no Methodist preaching had yet been established
in Brookville, my mother opened her doors to the transient
preacher and for prayer-meetings, then for class-meetings
and for preaching, and thus she entered upon her life
work, and for more than fifty years those doors stood
open to Methodist preachers. Was it any inferior
heroism which would prepare that single room, at once
parlor and bed-room and kitchen, for prayer-meetings,
and then, after the meeting was over, clean up after
the filthy tobacco chewers who not only defiled the
floor, but sometimes, from sheer devilishness, would
besmear the walls? Later, and when an addition
was built to the house, the best room was specially
fitted up for a preacher’s room, with its bed,
and table, and chair, and fire-place, and then another
bed was added, because one bed, though carrying double,
was often insufficient for the demands. That
room was never occupied for twenty-five years by any
member of the family, for it could never be certain,
even at bed time, that some belated traveler would
not call for entertainment before morning.
A panorama of that heroic woman’s
work for twenty-five years would give new ideas to
many of this generation of the demands made upon the
women of that heroic period, and how they were met.
For many years either Bishop Soule or Bishop Roberts,
or both, were frequent guests, going to or returning
from one of their Conferences, and Presiding Elders
Griffeth, and Strange, and Wiley, and Havens, for twenty
years never stopped in Brookville with any other family,
whether attending our own quarterly meetings or passing
through to some other; and for more than twenty years
the bi-weekly rounds of the circuit preacher never
failed to bring a guest, while the junior preacher,
always an unmarried man, made it his headquarters,
and spent his rest weeks in that preachers’
room. There John P. Durbin studied English grammar
without a teacher, and Russel Bigelow, and John F.
Wright, and James B. Finley were frequent guests.
The new preacher, with his family, always stopped with
us until some house somewhere on the circuit could
be rented, for it was before the days of parsonages,
and preachers moving through to their circuits stayed
over night, and often over Sunday, with their hired
team and all. This, too, at a period when in
addition to the duties of housewifery as now understood,
spinning, and weaving, and knitting, and making, and
milking, and churning constituted no small item of
domestic affairs, and usually without the intervention
of the modern appliance called “help.”
To these were to be added a quarterly meeting once
a year for a circuit that embraced nearly half of
the present Connersville district, when for years
no other door was opened to entertain a single one
of those who came from all parts of the circuit, and
a camp-meeting once a year, with all the burdens that
old-fashioned camp-meetings fastened upon tent-holders.
But this was not all it was hardly half.
For a decade or more after the opening of the “New
Purchase,” not a week passed that some one,
purporting to be a Methodist preacher, did not claim
the rites of hospitality as he was going from Ohio
or Kentucky to the “New Purchase” to enter
land or to see the country. These, with an eye
to economy, always inquired for the next “Methodist
tavern,” and they never failed to avail themselves
of the information obtained. In many respects
these were sometimes burdensome. They were not
only strangers, but they were traveling on business
purely secular, and they were often irregular and
called at unseasonable hours. One of these calls
I had occasion to remember. It was in the summer
of 1825, and before the days of lucifer matches.
If the fire died out, there was no starting another
without getting a live coal from some neighbor.
Such a calamity had occurred at our house, and I was
dispatched to the nearest neighbor’s for a coal,
only to return with the intelligence that her fire
was out, too. “But why did you not go to
the next neighbor?” asked my mother. “Go,
and keep on going, till you get what you go for,”
was the command, and I went. The next day was
wash day, and the family dinner had been served, and
the dishes put away, and the wash tub resumed, when
two strange preachers rode up and asked for dinner.
What was to be done? In addition to the hindrance
in washing, there was not a crust of bread in the
house, and even if the travelers had time to wait,
there was no time to spare from washing to bake bread.
In the emergency I was dispatched to the nearest neighbor
to borrow a loaf, but her cupboard was bare, too.
Remembering the instructions, “Keep going until
you get what you go for,” I started at double
quick to the next neighbor, and to the next, and the
next, for three-quarters of an hour. I must have
zig-zagged several miles, only to return with the sad
news that there was not a loaf of bread in the town.
Meanwhile my mother had taken in the situation, and
when I got home exhausted and disgusted, the travelers
were eating their dinner, a skillet full of biscuits
having been baked at short notice. Soon they
were on their horses, and the work at the wash tub
was resumed. Though the occasion was a trying
one, not a word of murmur escaped the lips of that
heroic woman, for she endured as seeing the Invisible.
Was she not a hero?
During those years of special hardships,
my mother had the companionship and aid of a younger
sister, a bright, red-headed girl, as fleet of foot
as the mountain gazelle, with a voice, at least to
me, as sweet as the melody of angels. Through
the misty past of more than sixty years, there comes
the memory of several incidents illustrative of both
her moral and physical heroism. On one occasion,
not unlike that just referred to, she was called to
set aside her spinning-wheel just when the weaver was
clamoring for the yarn which was to go into the beautiful
home-made flannel, from which her new Sunday dress
was to be made, and which she had promised to furnish
that day. More than an hour of precious time had
been consumed when she resumed her spinning, striking
up in her inimitable treble:
“And let this
feeble body fail.”
Young as I was, I had sympathized
with her in her loss of time, feeling that at least
on that occasion it was an imposition that entire
strangers should call at that unreasonable hour for
a dinner, because they could get it free, but her
heart seemed to be in the song, and as she whirled
the wheel still more vigorously, and stepped mere rapidly,
as if to make up lost time, she came to
“In hope of that
immortal crown,
I now the
Cross sustain:
And gladly wander up
and down,
And smile
at toil and pain.”
It seemed to my childish imagination
that she was triumphing over her difficulties and
defying toil and pain, with words specially adapted
to her “up and down,” the to and fro movement
in spinning. It was an exhibition of moral heroism,
not often surpassed by martyr or confessor. But
she was a physical hero as well. I saw her tested
once at a camp-meeting, when she was about twenty
years of age. My father had invited a number
of young men, who were standing around, to eat dinner
at his table on Sunday. Already more than fifty
had eaten. When these young men were seated her
eye caught one, to whom she walked without consulting
any person, and laying her hand upon his shoulder,
she said in a distinct voice: “Sir, you
can not eat dinner at this table. You were with
that crowd of rowdies last night that held a mock sacrament
with whisky, and if you do not leave in a second, I’ll
help you leave.” One glance at her eye
was sufficient, and he left at once. The deed
was the more heroic because the unfortunate youth
belonged to a family that was much respected.
The great fighting preacher, Havens, never displayed
more heroism in any of his encounters with the roughs
of that period. That heroic girl became a mother
afterwards, and she communicated to her children the
same high purpose of life. She, though a widow,
gave her eldest son to her country, and his blood
was the very first to fatten the soil of West Virginia
in the late war, and her second son, under difficulties
and discouragements that would have appalled any one
but a hero, was wisely trained in head and heart,
and she gave him to De Pauw University in the person
of your gifted and honored red-headed Vice-President.
Others may sing the man, but give me the loftier theme,
the heroic women of early Indiana Methodism.