Appalachian History

"Once we hit a place where a feud was being settled. It was back in the hill country of Virginia and the place was called Rocky Comfort. It really wasn't a town. There was a water-power grist mill, a store, a blacksmith shop and about a quarter of a mile up the little valley there was a meeting house, where traveling preachers would sometimes hold revivals which were called camp meetings.

"The feud was between the Buxton --or Bruxton-- and another bunch of natives named Greenberry,--I think that was the name.

"Old Uncle Jed Buxton, a tall, sharp-eyed old fellow with a yellowish-gray, hang-down, moustache was boss of the Buxton bunch and Grandpappy Lindsay Greenberry was head of the enemy tribe.

"I never heard what the feud started over, probably some Buxton stole a Greenberry pig, or some Greenberry shot a Buxton cow. But whatever it was that started it there'd been killing on both sides and from what I heard about it they were always gunning or ganging up on each other, or cutting each other up with Bowie knives. The cause of the feud wasn't important, though; it was the way it ended that seemed funny to me.

"And a queer thing was that both tribes were religious and when they'd go to the camp-meetings they've have a temporary truce while the meeting was going on.

"It was at the camp-meeting the feud ended. The preacher was a big raw-boned Hard-shell Baptist, and he certainly believed in hell-fire and damnation; and when he'd get up and start to preach he'd always pull out a twist of long-green tobacco and pull off a big chew--then he was ready to go at it. And he went.

"He was almost as good as Doc Porter when it came to oratory. He talked hell-fire and brimstone...sizzlin' and bilin' and smokin' until he'd have the whole audience sweating and groaning. Finally he got under the hides of the Buxtons and Greenberrys and had them all tremblin' on the brink as he called it...jest hangin'over eternal damnation by a brickle thread!

"The payoff was that old Uncle Jed Buxton and Grandpappy Greenberry both got more religion than they'd ever got before and decided to make peace and stop their tribes from carving and shooting and beating each other up.

"The preacher got them together at the mourner's bench and got them to agree to make friends and be brethren. But they had to do something to prove the treaty would last and they could trust each other... And that's where the funny part of it came in.

"Old Uncle Jed Buxton and Grandpap Greenberry acted for the whole bunch of each of their tribes. The peace ceremony was performed at the camp-meeting in the presence of the whole audience, the Hard-shell Baptist preacher acted as master of ceremonies. You'd never guess how they pledged themselves and proved that they trusted each other. Those two old mountain codgers who had been killin' enemies shaved each other! And not with safety razors either!

"They did it right on the preacher's platform while the whole congregation looked on and muttered a lot of 'Amens' and 'Praise the Lords.'

"They drew straws for to see who should shave who first, and Uncle Jed Buxton got the chair first. Grandpappy Greenberry lathered Uncle Jed up, took that wicked long-bladed razor (the preacher supplied the outfit) and whittled the whiskers off of Uncle Jed's face and neck...but when he got down around Uncle Jed's wind-pipes I noticed the Buxton clan got mighty tense and silent. But Uncle Jed didn't bat an eye while his old enemy was fooling around his neck with that darned sharp razor!

"When Uncle Jed was well shaved, Grandpappy Greenberry sat down in the chair, which was a common hickory split-bottom kitchen chair, and Uncle Jed took the razor and went over him!

"That settled the feuds. Each had trusted his neck to the other when the other had a sharp razor in his hand...and as far as I know they never feuded again. But I'll say those two tough old mountain hillbillies had a lot of nerve."


Source: Library of Congress, American Memory, American Life Histories: Manuscripts for the Federal Writers' Project, 1936-1940. From an interview conducted with William D. Naylor on Sept, 19, 1938; Sept. 27, 1938; Oct. 1 and 3, 1938 by Earl Bowman



appalachia appalachia+history camp+meeting feuds history+of+appalachia revival+meeting

"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

"One night during a revival, we had a very heavy rain. Besides myself, only one other person showed up at the church, a young man. I read a scripture lesson, and had prayer before the young man said, 'Now, Preacher, you have to go home with me tonight. There is nobody else here.' Well, we walked for a mile up a steep hill in the red mud.

"The boy hung up his lantern and said, 'Hey, Paw, guess what we have for breakfast? Preacher!'

"'Put him in your bed. You can sleep on the cot,' said Paw. Man and wife were in a bed in the front room.

"The son picked up the oil lamp from the table and led the way up a steep stairway to the second floor. It was a story and a half house, with the sloping ceilings common to such. There were four teenage daughters, lying in two double beds in a room without partitions. The boy put down the lamp, took off all his clothes, and lay down on the cot.

"'You can have my bed there,' he said, indicating another double bed.

"'Do you blow out this lamp?' I asked.

"'Nope, we leave her burn,' he replied.

"What was I to do? I had to get into my pajamas in some way, and while the girls all had their eyes closed, I had no way of knowing if they were asleep, or 'playing possum.'

"Because of the slope of the ceiling, the bed would go no closer than three feet to the wall. I bent over, after having turned the lamp down as low as I dared, crawled back in the space behind the head of the bed, and changed my clothes. I came out, turned up the lamp, put my shirt over the dirty pillow, and crawled into the filthy sheets.

"In a few minutes, I felt something crawling on my back. I caught the insect and crushed it between my finger and thumb, and knew from the odor that I had caught a bedbug. I fought those bugs all night until about 4:30, when the daylight gave me relief. When I threw back the covers, a whole battalion of bedbugs scurried for cover into a hole in the old straw mattress.

"'Well, I sung the cooks up; now I'll sing the preacher up.' the father said. He sang all the way out to feed the pigs.

"I drove the 26 miles back home that night after church. When I told Elizabeth at the door about the bedbugs, she made me take off all my clothes on the front porch. I even had to leave my suitcase outside. Needless to say, I never went back to that house to eat or sleep again!

"Such are the fortunes of those who would serve the Lord in West Virginia in the earlier days. I found that conditions were worse near the Ohio River than in the mountain areas of the state."


"An Autobiography"
Rev. Troy Robert Brady
(1906-1999)
Elkins, W. Va native


source: http://freepages.rootsweb.com/~bradytrilogy/anthology/

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