All Rights Reserved By HDM For This Digital Publication Copyright 1998 Holiness Data Ministry Duplication of this CD by any means is forbidden, and copies of individual files must be made in accordance with the restrictions stated in the B4Ucopy.txt file on this CD. * * * * * * * MY LIFE STORY AS A MOUNTAIN BOY AND PREACHER By B. H. Lucas NO PUBLISHING INFORMATION Printed Book: No Date -- No Copyright * * * * * * * Digital Edition 05/13/98 By Holiness Data Ministry * * * * * * * PREFACE The value of Christian testimony in persuading men to be saved has never been rated at its full worth. When St. Paul's life was at stake, whether before a Jewish mob or a pagan king, he always told his experience. You will find in this book the life story of Reverend B. H. Lucas. Although he was deprived of a theological education God used him in bringing the glad message of salvation to thousands. It is a demonstration of what God can do in uplifting from a lower to a higher plane of living. Evangelist R. W. Chatfield * * * * * * * INTRODUCTION As an Evangelist I have been asked to write an introduction to this book. I have known the Rev. B. H. Lucas for over twenty-five years. He is one of God's good men and one of the Holiness Movement's good evangelists and pastors, winning thousands of souls to God. He is fearless, never compromising and a dynamic speaker. His messages are saturated with prayer; he is tender in spirit. Bro.. Lucas has been redeemed from a life of sin and is a miracle of divine grace. You are sure to receive light and truth from reading this book. It should be in every home in America. I heartily recommend this book to his many friends and also to my friends among all denominations. I pray that the Spirit that has always dominated this life may be felt in the pages of this life's story. Evangelist C. B. Fugett * * * * * * * CONTENTS 1 My Childhood Days 2 When I Left Home 3 Courtship and Marriage 4 My Marvelous Conversion and Call to Preach 5 My First Full Time Pastor Charge 6 My Experiences as An Evangelist 7 My Pastoral and Home Missionary Work in Kentucky 8 The Scattering of My Family 9 My Experiences on the Eastern Shore * * * * * * * Chapter 1 MY CHILDHOOD DAYS I want to grant the request of many of my friends by writing a book about my life. I was born the first time into this world at String Town, Willard, Kentucky, February 17, 1889. We lived there about four years. The child next to me was a girl, whose name was Bertha. When she was two or three days old, my Aunt Jane was staying with us taking care of mother, and one afternoon after she had cleared the dinner dishes away, she felt so bad she went out on the back porch and lay on two chairs and went to sleep. The sun finally made its way around the corner of the house, and shone on her for a while. When she awoke, she was broke out with the measles and had to be confined to bed. Then we had to send and get Grandma to come and take care of Aunt Jane and Mother. In about ten days, Mother broke out with measles. That was the way old time religion did me. When I went to work the next day, it broke out on me, and folks knew I had it. Mother was a tall woman with long, black hair. When she sat in a straight-backed chair, her hair lay in a ring on the floor. Mother became very ill with measles, and most of her hair came out, but it grew again before very long, and was somewhat shorter than it had been originally. In about two years, another girl was born in our home. Her name was May, and I can remember when she was born. One night when May was a baby, my Mother got scared. She took May in her arms and Bertha by the hand, and we went through a big field, climbed a big rail fence, and reached the neighbor's house on the next farm before anything caught us. We moved from String Town to near Carter City, Kentucky. Then we moved over on the Half Way Branch above Carter City. My Mother's first husband's sister lived down below us and we were staying with them until we got a house built. Her name was Ollie Wiggens. Her husband became a preacher some years after that. While staying with Mrs. Wiggens, we didn't have anything to eat for a day or two, and my aunt by marriage went to the store and got some fat meat and corn meal. She baked a big pone of corn bread and fried a plate of side meat. It seems that I ate too much, and it was years before I could eat meat or anything very greasy. But Mother began frying sorghum molasses in grease and I got to eating them, and so I could eat grease again. We then moved over on Zornes Branch, and my Mother went to work at Carter City. A big building had been built there, and it was called the Pavilion. They ran excursion trains there from Cincinnati, Ohio, on Sundays and holidays. On one of these excursion trains, Old Man Johnson, the conductor, found a baby girl in the ladies' rest room, but he never found the mother. She will be found at the Judgment. Mr. Johnson named the baby Ollie Ganunk. My Mother worked at this building getting things ready for the week-end. She would leave about daylight and wouldn't get back home until after dark. We had a big willow rocking chair that would hold all four of us ; and we would sit in that chair and sing songs for half a day at a time. Then we would pop corn for our dinner or parch some field corn and grind it in a coffee mill, and put some sugar and milk on it and eat that. You see, that's where we got our vitamins. We didn't know what a vitamin was then. If some one would have asked us if we had any vitamins, we probably would have asked how to catch the varmint, with dogs? do you trap them? or do you kill them with a gun? It was while we lived here that the youngest child died. His name was Luther. A family that lived down below us lost one of their children, and one night while Father was at this house, Mother looked down there, and she saw an angel sitting on the rail fence that was around our house. She said this was a token that Luther was going to die. Sure enough, in a few days, Luther took sick and was sick for a little while. One night just as we were ready to eat supper, Mother was sitting at the end of the table. She said, "My baby is dying." She handed him to a neighbor and the child passed away. We were living in this same place when a great hail storm came just at corn-cutting time. Hail fell as big as baseballs. After the storm was over, my sisters, Bertha and May, and I, went to the spring and picked up a bucket of ice and had ice water before we ever knew there was anything like an ice plant. This hail was so big it went through galvanized roofing, knocked one mule down twice, and broke a calf's back. These are the ones I know about, and I don't know how many more. While we were living here, we raised so many beans that I wished I had never seen a bean. One year while we lived here, we planted a bean they call the "greasy bean." I picked and strung beans and strung them on strings. These we hung around the wall to dry, to make shuck beans or "leather-britches." I tell you, I picked and strung beans that year, and cried and wished there had never been a bean in the world. That year, and many other years, Mother picked a sixty-gallon barrel of beans, a sixty-gallon barrel of kraut, and sixty gallons of corn-on-the-cob. My father wasn't much to work, so Mother and I had to raise something during the summer to live on in the winter. Well, that's the way the ants do, and the Bible makes mention of them. We moved from here to Greenup County. There Mother and her first husband separated ; she left him. My step-father moved back to Carter County in a two-horse wagon, and there we met. I had been with Mother, Bertha had gone with Father, and Mother also kept May. Then one day Father came and got May. At that time I was nine years old, Bertha was seven, and May was five. We never saw each other again until we were all grown. I stayed with Grandma for a while. She lived in a big house on the head of what was called the "Wilcox Branch," which emptied into Buffalo Creek, just below Carter City. This house didn't have a floor in it for years, other than a dirt floor. They swept it every morning, just as we sweep our wood floors. Out in front of this house, they had cut down a large poplar tree, which measured about five feet in diameter.