Title: The Heroic Women of Early Indiana Methodism: An Address Delivered Before the Indiana Methodist Historical Society
Author: Goodwin, T. A. (Thomas Aiken), 1818-1906
Language: English
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THE HEROIC WOMEN

OF

EARLY INDIANA METHODISM.


AN ADDRESS DELIVERED BEFORE THE

Indiana Methodist Historical Society

AT

DE PAUW UNIVERSITY,

June 16, 1889,


BY

REV. T. A. GOODWIN, D. D.


INDIANAPOLIS, IND.:
INDIANAPOLIS PRINTING COMPANY.
1889.



The Heroic Women of Early Indiana Methodism.


"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 Solomon's 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.





*** End of this LibraryBlog Digital Book "The Heroic Women of Early Indiana Methodism: An Address Delivered Before the Indiana Methodist Historical Society" ***

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