The Galax Gatherers
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The Galax Gatherers The Galax Gatherers The Gospel among the Highlanders Edward o. Guerrant With an Introduction by Mark Huddle Appalachian Echoes Durwood Dunn, Nonfiction Editor The University of Tennessee Press I Knoxville The Appalachian Echoes series is dedicated to revlvmg and contextualizing classic books about Appalachia for a new generation of readers. By making available a wide spectrum ofworks-from fiction to nonfiction, from folklife and letters to history, sociology, politics, religion, and biography-the series seeks to reveal the diversity that has always characterized Appalachian writing, a diversity that promises to confront and challenge long,held stereotypes about the region. ~ Copyright © 2005 by The University of Tennessee Press I Knoxville. All Rights Reserved. Manufactured in the United States ofAmerica. First Edition. Guerrant's original work was published in 1910. This book is printed on acid,free paper. Library of Congress Cataloging,in'Publication Data Guerrant, Edward O. (Edward Owings), 1838,1916. The galax : the Gospel among the highlanders I Edward O. Guerrant; with an introduction by Mark Huddle.- 1st ed. p. em. - (Appalachian echoes) ISBN 1,57233,363A (pbk.) 1. Guerrant, Edward O. (Edward Owings), 1838,1916. 2. Missionaries-Appalachian Region, Southern-Biography. 3. Presbyterian Church in the U.S.-Clergy-Biography. 4. Home missions-Appalachian Region, Southern. 5. Presbyterian Church in the U.S.-Missions-Appalachian Region, Southern. 1. Title. II. Series. BV2765.5.G84A32005 266'.517691-dc22 2004016016 CONTENTS Foreword Durwood Dunn vii Home Missions Revisited: Edward O. Guerrant and the "Discovery" of Appalachia Mark Huddle xi Foreword to the First Edition xli The Galax Gatherers 1 Glencairn 6 In the Mountains of Old Virginia 9 In the North Carolina Alleghanies 15 On the Estatoa 19 The Scotch-Irish 24 Dan McIntosh 27 Dedication on Haddix Fork 30 A Highland Wedding 33 From the Big Black Mountain 36 The Ivy Patch 42 From Hazard 46 From the Troublesome 49 A Trip Up the Big Sandy 54 One Woman 57 Little Visit to Turkey Creek 59 Visit to Raven Roost 62 On the Shoulder Blade 66 Proctor Bill 68 Chenowee (Dr. J. D. Patton) 73 On the Upper Quicksand 76 Elkatawa 88 Panther Ridge 86 The House that God Built ........................... .. 91 The Church on the Grapevine 94 VI CONTENTS Preaching to the Poor 98 Coming to Christ Barefooted 102 Visit to Cataloochee 104 In the Great Smoky Mountains 109 At Ebenezer 113 Bear Creek 11 7 Mormons in the Mountains 119 Satan and the Mormons 129 Missions on the Canoe 132 Dedication of the Church on the Canoe 136 On the Canoe 140 The Regions Beyond 144 Puncheon Camp 147 Twenty Years After 150 Bloody Breathitt 152 Highland College 156 A Red Letter Day 157 To the Children of the City 161 The Orphans Home (Dr. D. Clay Lilly) 162 Feed My Lambs 166 Two Highland Funerals (Mrs. Mary O'Rear Everett) 171 A Tour Through the Cumberlands 175 Glen Athol (Mrs. Mary Hoge Wardlaw) 179 A Unique Contest 184 A Word from Prof. Gordon 186 Pentecost at Puncheon Camp (Rev. J A. Bryan) 189 A Girl's in the Far Cumberlands 191 On the Grapevine (Grace Guerrant) 195 To Big Creek Guerrant) 199 Jett's Creek 202 The Lucky Thirteen 205 From the Lost Creek 208 A Teacher's Letter 212 FOREWORD Durwood Dunn Deborah Vansau McCauley argues persuasively in her 1995 Appalachian Mountain Religion: A History that Appalachian reli, gion is an invisible gap in both American religious history and Appalachian studies generally. Because it is an oral tradition known primarily through its oral literature and material culture, she concludes, Appalachian mountain religion has been sys, tematically attacked by mainstream Protestant denominations which, unable to control or dominate such a separate and dis, tinctive regional variation of religion, have so misconstrued its nature as to create a virtual vacuum in the American national mirror. After 1890, the dominant religious culture of American Protestantism further denigrated the religion of the area and reduced it to total invisibility by sending in "home missionariesll in an act of self,validation of their assumption that there was really no religion, or Christianity, in these mountains. Chief among the offenders, McCauley argues, was Dr. Edward O. Guerrant 0838-1916), a pioneer eastern Kentucky missionary. The son of a physician, Guerrant entered Centre College in Danville, Kentucky, in 1856, where he expe, rienced a powerful religious conversion. During the Civil War, Guerrant served on the staffs of Generals Humphrey Marshall, William Preston, and John S. Williams in the Confederate army, seeing action in southwest Virginia and East Tennessee. After the war, Guerrant studied medicine at Jefferson Medical College in Philadelphia before graduating from Bellevue Hospital Medical College in New York in 1867. After prac, ticing medicine for six years, Guerrant entered Union VIII FOREWORD Theological Seminary in Richmond, Virginia, graduating in 1875. Appointed to the Committee on Home Missions of the Synod of Kentucky in 1877, he became a leading spokesman for missionary work in the Cumberland Mountains of Ken, tucky. By 1881, the Presbyterian Church U.S. (southern Presbyterians) had appointed him evangelist of the synod for the eastern half of Kentucky, from which position he conducted wide'ranging missionary work throughout the mountains. Guerrant organized scores of churches and Sunday schools during the 1880s and 1890s in the mountains of eastern Ken' tucky, eventually spreading out into the surrounding moun' tains of western North Carolina and East Tennessee. In 1897, he founded the Society of Soul Winners to extend this work. By 1910, with a budget for this society of nearly thirteen thou' sand dollars, Guerrant turned his focus on founding schools and colleges in the Appalachian mountains. In 1913 the soci, ety's assets, when turned over to the Presbyterian church, included seventeen schools and mission stations, an orphan, age, thirty,four buildings valued at fifty thousand dollars, and a staff of fifty "home" missionaries. David Whisnant sees Guerrant as a mediator between the social and economic orders and self,concepts of the mountains and the Bluegrass part of the state, who pressed the claims ofsocial conscience on the larger community for the plight of poverty into which many had fallen. In 1910, in an effort to reach a broader national audience to support his numerous missions and schools in the mountains, Guerrant published an account of his travels entitled The Galax Gatherers: The Gospel among the Highlanders. Despite many inaccuracies and the book's admittedly propagandistic purpose of soliciting donations for his various schools and missions, Guerrant's work is a compelling contemporary account ofone of the leaders in the vanguard of the home mission movement nationally. It offers an important ethnographic description of FOREWORD IX both the locales and the peoples in the Cumberland Mountains of Kentucky and the Allegheny Mountains of North Carolina and East Tennessee. More significantly, however, this reprint edition of The Galax Gatherers will make available one of the key texts of these mountain missionaries and allow the modem reader to assess Deborah McCauley's charges against them. It is undoubtedly true, for example, that Guerrant finds little evi, dence of indigenous mountain religion or preachers. Was he indeed deliberately blind to their presence? The only specific attack he made against any other denomination is a diatribe against the Mormons. In other circumstances, he seemed per, fectly willing to conduct joint services with local Methodist ministers, for example. Perhaps the most important question a modem scholar of Appalachia might ask, however, is whether Guerrant's descrip, tion of the great poverty of these mountain people was accu, rate, and why, if there was an active, indigenous mountain reli, gion, so many people flocked to his services and joined his church. He attributed this poverty solely to the unproductive, scarce farmland in the Cumberland Mountains, not to any innate genetic disorder among the natives. "No one who ever travelled through the Allegheny or Cumberland Mountains," he remarks in this regard, "failed to notice the swarms ofbright children which met him everywhere." Were the schools and colleges Guerrant's organization founded beneficial to inhabi' tants of the region, or merely an unwanted example ofcultural imperialism? A close reading of The Galax Gatherers confirms many of the critic's charges against mountain missionaries, but it also leaves the impression that the historical reality is much more complex. However interesting his descriptive writing is, unfortunately Guerrant was also blind to, or at least silent about, some very significant economic developments in East Tennessee and western North Carolina between 1880 and 1910. He does not x FOREWORD mention the rapidly developing extractive industries of timber or coal, nor does he ever elaborate on the growing tourism and textiles which likewise directly affected the lives of many of the mountain people he encountered. Nor does he mention other outreach programs sponsored by other denominations in Appa~ lachia, such as Berea College in eastern Kentucky or any of the other settlement schools. As a former Confederate, did he view the changing economy of this whole region with distaste, long~ ing for the preindustrial period before and during the Civil War, which he wrote about in his earlier diaries, when Appalachia seemed remote from railroads or other forms of capitalist incursion? Finally, Mark Huddle's introduction to this edition places both Guerrant and his writing within a broader cultural context of rapid and dramatic changes in American Protestantism at the end of the nineteenth century. He rightly suggests that perhaps the greatest value in reprinting Guerrant's classic 1910 text is to extend scholarly debate over the nature and historical transition ofAppalachia at the beginning of the last century. The complex interaction between the inhabitants of the region and various home missions defies both simplistic generalizations about reli~ gion and the perception of cultural isolation in Appalachia.