Appalachian History

"We go to bed at night and get up in the morning, and our Milk Bottles are standing on the back porch waiting for us," observed Rev. W.L. Stidger in a sermon titled 'Milk Bottles & Monotony.'

"Fifty years ago we got up at five o'clock, dressed in the cold, shivering as we dressed, went out to the barn, knocked ice from the buckets, primed the old iron pump with hastily heated hot water, and milked the cows before breakfast. We worked for our milk then. Now it is brought to us. That is monotony."

William Stidger in Missouri, about 1925.

Stidger published this sermon in 1926, the same year that writer Sinclair Lewis was spending time shadowing the famous preacher as part of his research for a forthcoming novel about the Chautauqua circuit and the preachers it produced.

Stidger himself apparently wasn't bored having his milk brought to him. He had a full time maid and gardener when he wrote these words.

William Leroy Stidger (1885-1949) attracted Lewis' attention for the modern marketing methods and publicity tactics he brought to his crusade to save souls.

Long before Sinclair Lewis appeared in his life, the future preacher grew up to the slow tempo of late nineteenth century daily life in Moundsville, WV. This town of 5,000 souls was disrupted each summer by Methodist revival camp meetings that more than doubled the population.

"The town rocked with religion each summer," says John Hyland in Evangelism's First Modern Media Star: Reverend Bill Stidger. "It was a form of group hysteria. People would climb over chairs to get down the aisles to confess their sins."

Religious fervor wafted through the heat in the summer of 1901 as Rev. William B. King pressed his followers to find salvation. One audience member, 16-year-old Bill Stidger, decided then and there to follow the ministry. "He learned about evangelism from the exhorters," notes Hyland, his grandson.

Moundsville, West Virginia in 1899.

Stidger went on to become an ingenious innovator whose marketing abilities filled churches wherever he pastored: San Francisco, San Jose, Detroit, Kansas City, and Boston. He wrote 52 books, ran FDR's radio reelection campaign in 1936, and taught techniques for sermon writing at Boston University's School of Theology. He was one of the first radio preachers. By the mid-1930s, Stidger had a radio audience of half a million listeners.

Sinclair Lewis and Stidger first met in Terre Haute, IN in August of 1922 when Stidger was lecturing on the Chautauqua circuit. He challenged Sinclair Lewis to write a "real preacher book" about a minister "who lives and walks and has a being; not all good, not all bad---some of both---a human being."

Four years later Lewis accepted the Reverend's invitation to stay at his house to help get the sense of a preacher's world. Lewis wasn't the best houseguest: he stayed with the Stidgers for several weeks, during which time he was visited by Ethel Barrymore, Edwin Markahm, William Allen White, Gilbert Frankau and Harpo Marx. They came to attend a wedding between Stidger's maid and a gardener - a ceremony which Stidger had planned to conduct quietly. But Lewis slipped out and called a newspaper and the wedding made the front page.

When Elmer Gantry released, Stidger was pastoring the Linwood Boulevard Methodist Episcopal Church in Kansas City, MO. He'd let it be known that Lewis would be writing about him, which led many to think he was the model for Gantry (which, in part, he was). Naturally, he was outraged when he saw how Lewis had shaped the novel---nearly every man of God is either a hypocrite or a closet agnostic.

This photograph of Sinclair Lewis was taken by Nikolas Muray for Vanity Fair magazine in the 1920s.

The Gantry publication created a church backlash and the book was banned and burned in many cities. Stidger declared that the book contained fifty technical errors in its account of church practices and that the author had been drunk all the time he was working on the book.

Shot back Lewis: “Stidger was a flamboyant man who in many ways resembled Elmer Gantry…unaware of the kind of novel that Elmer Gantry was to be, he went to Kansas City…boasting that the central character was to be modeled on himself.”

A bitter battle ensued between the two men, conducted in the press and from the pulpit, which neither of them ultimately won.


Sources: "Stidger," Russell Maloney, The Talk of the Town, The New Yorker, March 2, 1940, p. 9
Evangelism's First Modern Media Star: Reverend Bill Stidger, by Jack Hyland, Cooper Square Press, 2002
www.stidger.com
www.archive.org/stream/MN40290ucmf_8/MN40290ucmf_8_djvu.txt
Sinclair Lewis, by Richard R. Lingeman, Minnesota Historical Society, 2005
Sinclair Lewis: an American Life, by Mark Schorer, New York, McGraw Hill, 1961



are delightfulappalachia William+Stidger Moundsville revival+meeting Sinclair+Lewis Elmer+Gantry +appalachia+history history+of+appalachia

Scholars and archaelogists have been duking it out over the authenticity of the Grave Creek Stone since it first surfaced in 1838.

Local amateur archaelogists in what was originally called “the Flats of Grave Creek” and is today Moundsville, WV reportedly found it during the first recorded excavation of Grave Creek Mound.

This burial mound was built in successive stages from about 250-150 BC by the Adena culture (~1000 B.C. to ~1 A.D.) This Woodland Period group had well-organized societies and lived in a wide area including much of present day Ohio, Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky and parts of Pennsylvania and New York.

In addition to the Adena ornaments and remains found in the interior, the first of two vaults allegedly contained a small flat sandstone tablet inscribed in an unrecognizable alphabet.

In 1847, archaelogist E.G. Squier made quite a fuss over the "singular omission" of any mention of the tablet in Dr. James W. Clemens' first-hand, day-by day account of the excavation, which appeared in ‘Crania Americana’ (1839), by S.G. Morton. In 1858, however, anthropologist Wills de Hass managed to produce the manuscript original of Clemens' account, and demonstrated that Morton had merely taken it upon himself to eliminate the stone's discovery from the published version. Dr. Clemens in fact recorded the inscribed stone on the day of its discovery.

By 1868 the stone was in the collection of E.H. Davis, Squier ‘s partner in the Squier & Davis archaelogy firm, before most of Davis' collection was sold to the Blackmore Museum, now part of the British Museum. Davis made a plaster cast of the stone and deposited it in the Smithsonian Institution, but the original never made it to the British Museum.

Charles Whittlesey, a prominent soldier, attorney and scholar, writing in "Archaeological Frauds," (1876) cites Squier's finding that "Dr. Clemens, in his first account of the opening of the mound, makes no mention of this stone" but himself makes no mention of de Hass's correction of this misconception.

By 1876, there were 4 plaster casts of the stone, 1 wax cast, and 6 drawings, most made from inferior copies of the stone, and not the original. "If the Grave Creek find was free from suspicion as to its integrity,” noted Whittlesey, “it has undergone so many mutations from transcribers and translators that its value to ethnologists is gone."

The Ohio State Archaeological Society appointed a committee in 1877 to study the authenticity of the stone. Committee member Rev. J.B. MacLean "did not hesitate to pronounce its authenticity as incontestable.... Regardless of who found the stone or whether it was discovered inside or outside the mound, all professed witnesses agreed it had come from the mound.”

Whittlesey returns to the topic in an 1879 article, "The Grave Creek Inscribed Stone." “The characters on the stone, by whomsoever they were cut,” he declares, “are not alphabetical or phonetic. If they have any meaning and are not a mere jumble of characters they must be symbolic or picture writing. It is therefore of small consequence whether the stone is antique or modern, whether it is genuine or a fraud."

After Whittlesey's two articles the Grave Creek Stone was generally dropped from serious consideration by archaeologists, except as a textbook example of an established hoax. It was so thoroughly discredited that they even lost track of its whereabouts.

Wills de Hass was appointed in 1881 to head the Smithsonian Bureau of Ethnology's Mound Survey project, but was replaced after only a year in favor of Cyrus Thomas. It is not unlikely that this had something to do with his favorable position toward the Grave Creek Stone, whereas Thomas stood firmly in the skeptics camp. "What is in the published record is that DeHass got very little done,” said director John Wesley Powell. “He certainly was not a good field person."

DeHass mainly dropped from sight in archaeology, although he still maintained his interest in mounds and American archaeology, giving a few reports in the Anthropology section of the AAAS (magazine of the American Anthropological Society), and exploring a few ruins when he was named U.S. Consul in Yucatan. The stone was probably in his collection at the time of his death in 1910.


sources: www.wvculture.org/sites/gravecreek.html
www.econ.ohio-state.edu/jhm/arch/grvcrk.html
www.nps.gov/history/archeology/sites/Antiquities/activities/saabrwi.htm



appalachia Grave+Creek+Stone Wills+de+Hass Charles+Whittlesey Adena+mound+builders Moundsville appalachian+history appalachian+mountains+history

“I'll tell you, Mrs. Higher was right down here on the corner. As you go down over the hill and go to town. She was right on the corner. That corner building was where she was. And she was a mighty good old lady. She kept all the loggers, you know, the woodsmen came and she took care of them and was good to them. And she set a good table. And then she married this... she'd been married to Magan. And he was a drunkard, you know, she was married to him and he died. And then she married this old Higher... Frank Higher. And he finally murdered her. Just murdered her brutally.

“I was working in Elkins when that happened. He just beat her up and stood on her and mashed her insides out and everything else. And he dragged her back into the little back room... it's not there now, its tore down, and he put her in the bathtub they thought he was trying to revive her. And as he drug her out she lost her teeth and they were found after she was buried.

“And so... he was hanged in Moundsville. And the best of it was his head fell off when they hung him. They put him on the gallows, sprung the thing and his head flew off. Well now she was this way... she would tell people, they'd get into troubles; "Now listen, don't disturb us, we fight that's our business". Says... "if he kills me that our business". Well at the time this happened nobody would help. They just wouldn't go in. They heard the karukus, but they just didn't go in. He didn't shoot her. He drug her around all over the building and through the lobby and then he drug her out the back through the kitchen. And her mother was sitting there. And he looked at her and said "I'll get you later." That's what they said.

“The old grandmaw was there. She hadn't walked very much for a long time and while he had her out and was finishing her up, why the grandmother went up the walk and went to a neighbor and hid. And I think she died from grief, you know, thinking about what all happened.”

Virginia Slaven
b. 1891
Cass, West Virginia
June 12, 1976 interview

Source: www.marshall.edu/library/speccoll/cass/html/slaven_transcript.asp

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Virginia+Slaven Mrs.+Higher Moundsville appalachia appalachian+culture appalachian+history history+of+appalachia