Copyright © 20071
Chapter 4 of the book
Boyhood Memories & Lessons
by
Isaiah Reid
Where in childhood I went on the blest Sabbath day;
To its portal my heart ever turns with delight,
For its blessings are with me by day and by night.
In its grove the birds sang and the wildflowers grew,
On its green lawn the roses and violets blew;
The summer winds wafted a fragrance most rare,
As the worshipers came to our temple of prayer;
It was plain, but ’twas beautiful always to me.2
This article is also available in the complete paperback version.COUNTRY AND HOME have their universal impress on the race. Among other well-defined environments that help largely to make us what we are is the home church and its life and influence. As the years move me away from life’s first sights, sounds, and impressions, the old church crops out more and more like the rocks on my native hills.
The old log church was a very primitive affair. It was not a quarter of a mile from the old home, up a little incline to the top of the ridge, and through a strip of old-time forest which the axe had but little marred. The burial of my grandfather was the first gathering of the people ever held at the place. There in the deep, dark woods they laid him to rest, when as yet the trees had kept their silent and solemn guard for long centuries. When I came to know the place, a nice plat of ground had all been nicely cleared off, fenced, sown in grass, and planted with some shrubbery, and was already marked with a number of white gravestones. To the west and north the old forest trees stood up in their strength and beauty seventy-five to one hundred feet high, like a mighty army on guard.
Southward away over the field to Uncle Lusk’s and beyond, all was cleared away. Eastward, down a grand and deep grassy hillside, Father had cut and cleared a fine pasture. In the northeast corner of the ground stood the church. It was perhaps twenty-four by forty feet in size. The story was not high. It was deficient in windows, and in the winter, when the doors must be closed, was gloomy enough to suggest a prison rather than a temple.3 The ceiling was made of boards. The walls were untouched since they left the hands of the builder who had finished the chinking by nicely plastering between the logs, in the usual way with all log houses. The pulpit was a huge structure, in one end boxed up so that the preacher, when he sat down, could hardly be seen at all. Going up the steps he entered by a door at one side, and he always shut the door as he passed in and turned the wooden button on the inside. As he rose to speak his head was quite near the ceiling, and before him spread a wide Bible board a foot wide and about six feet long. Underneath, in front, was a seat the length of the pulpit where old “Uncle Archie”4 used to sit in the winter and keep up the fire in the old “Nine Plate” stove, the first stove I ever saw, and a kind of wonder to the people. There were “Amen” corner seats,5 but we did not know them by that name then.
The author’s father, Thomas Reid, at age 916
The west side front seat was Father’s,7 and on the east side front seat most usually sat our Precentor,8 Uncle Tippen, a droll, tall, spare man, who used to make much merriment for brother Samuel9 and myself by his mannerisms. I suppose he could not have laughed, nor would not if he could, though the heavens had fallen. The solemnity of the gravestones out where Grandfather was buried is always associated with that man and his singing, in my mind. I do not remember ever to have heard in those days a single tune that had any kind of joyful measures in it. All were dirge-like, as if all were marching to the place of the execution of one of our number, as did our forefathers on the heather fields of Scotland.
When Uncle Tippen arose to sing, and it would have been considered a profanation if he had even a tuning fork to aid him in getting a key for the tune he intended to sing, I suppose he needed to have some plan to get the key he wanted. So when he arose he was quiet a little, and then he announced—“lined out”—the first two lines, in a uniform singsong, with a rising inflection; and as he did so, he had a peculiar way of bringing his knees around in a kind of circle, winding up with a kind of straightening up of limbs and knees at the end of the last line, when he seemed to be ready to start in on the singing. It was this peculiar swing of his body and circling at the knees that always amused and attracted brother Samuel and myself. It was kind of a secret fun between us, for we did not know that any others paid any attention to it, or thought it was funny. Then we had such an idea of the sacredness of the place and the service that we would as soon have been seen laughing at a funeral, so we hardly dared look at each other. In the later years of our life we used to talk about it and still smile over our boyhood experience. But I must have it all alone now. My brother, several years since, has met the Precentor beyond the gates of light,10 where the songs of the redeemed have neither discord nor awkward movements, and where it is manifest that the intention of the heart is always of more value than any kind of externalism, either cultured or uncultured.
Our seat being the first, I nearly always sat beside Father or Mother. I remember I felt the solemnity of the place, notwithstanding my restless body and wide-ranging imagination. I believed without question all I could understand. I felt the restraint under which I was held was right, though something within me felt stirred against it. I see now that the family control was a very good thing for me. So also was this constraining, solemnizing pressure of the service and the day, backed as it was by the power of the largest public sentiment I knew. To the young mind unused to the theater, and other public gatherings inimical to religious life, the power of public sentiment in a live church is very potent for good.
Though I could not keep run of the preacher in his long sermon, nor was I able to comprehend what Uncle Tippen lined out in the Psalm, nevertheless impressions were made on my young nature which will never leave me. I did not know God, but I believed Him. I did not know Jesus, but I believed in His Divine nature and sacrificial life. I had no way to prove to myself that life existed beyond the grave, yet I never had any doubt about it. My father believed it. The church believed it. It was best to believe it, although I did not know how to reason the matter out. Impression of the reality of life, and of the solemnity of death and eternity used to come on my young heart as I sat in that pew, six to eight years of age; and often when I got to thinking, and death was spoken of, the thought would come, “What if Father was to die?” and I could no longer control myself, and would jump up and run out of the house crying. They would follow me out and offer me water, ask if I was sick, and stay a while with me, but I never was able to tell anyone what was the matter. I did not know how.
All the services impressed me with a spirit of awe, reverence, solemnity. There was lacking the spirit of joy and victory of soul. It seemed as if the spirit in which the forefathers had signed the “Solemn League and Covenant”11 still predominated in thought and feeling. I firmly believe that many of them were so settled and grounded in the principles and doctrines of their religion that they would have gone to the stake, if necessary. The dominance of this line of thought was so great that I see now that this was of greater mention and of more import than consciousness of sins forgiven and conscious acceptance with God. I heard nothing much of this. As a usual thing the common thought was a hope of being saved. Their religion was a religion of hope rather than a religion of realization. In the securing of the conditions of this hope was the maintenance of the doctrines and the faith of the fathers.
Memory is pictured yet with their solemn faces. I see their attentive countenances. At the close of the long sermon, when the Psalm was announced, how the leaves of the Bibles and Psalm books would flutter and whisp as the place was found, and how a general clearing of throats ran over the congregation as a prelude to singing! After the benediction how gladly hands were clasped and greetings extended. I hurried out anxious to get outdoors, and home.
We always walked, as the distance was so short.12 The little meeting house was soon deserted, and the trees murmured their threnody13 as the sounds of the departing voices and riders and wagons died away. The grasshoppers along the walk from the church door to the gate trilled their iterative, short-meter notes with a crescendo movement up to a certain key, and then slid gently down again, then rode again to the heights from which they had fallen. A little later the cricket began piping his evening mass in the gathering shadows; a whippoorwill sang his plaintive note across the hill from the church; and farther away, in the deeps of some valley between high hills, a lonely owl broke the silence with a call which echoed far and wide.
Meanwhile the log meeting house was quiet, and whether because it was so near the graveyard or for some other reason, as dark was coming on I was always somewhat fearful to pass it, as I sometimes had to do in going for the cows. Beyond it, with the trees on the west throwing over them their kindly shadows, were laid the many friends who will tread those hills no more, in silent, unbroken sleep that knows no waking. The aspen tree at the south end of the lot swung its leaves as if last of all to keep watch. Down the hillside a mother sheep called for her lamb, and the lamb answered in treble a little way off. The stars came out. The moon rose over the hill. Across the valley a cow bell tinkled. The afterglow of the sunset behind the hills was dying slowly. The air was full of quiet, surcharged with helpful and inspiring suggestions. Nature kept up and re-preached in better recital the old log meeting house service.
L to R: Thomas Reid, little Arthur Reid (great-grandson), Rev. Isaiah Reid (the author, Thomas’s son), and Edwin Reid (grandson). We praise the Lord for godly fathers on Father’s Day!14Endnotes:
- Copyright © 2007 Jim Kerwin, all rights reserved ↩
- In an article entitled “The Covenanters: How They Bore the Cross” in The Salem (Indiana) Democrat (18 May 1904, p. 5), Isaiah’s first cousin Zella Lusk Burcham (daughter of paternal aunt Mary Reid Lusk) indirectly attributes this poem to Isaiah himself. She says, speaking of the children who grew up attending the Covenanter’s log church, that “one, now a white-haired minister in another church, has shown us in the following lines, that to him the memory of those days was sweet”; then she proceeds to quote the entire poem verbatim. Isaiah was not the only Reid to capture in poetry something of his Walnut Ridge youth. The family of another first cousin, Zella Reid Cronyn (Sarah Grizzelle Reid Cronyn, daughter of Isaiah’s paternal uncle Isaiah Reid, Jr.), published her poetry posthumously in 1906. This small work, entitled simply Poems, contains several odes to her childhood homestead, including “The Geode,” “Breaking the Colt,” and “Revisiting the Old Homestead.” ↩
- Zella Burcham, mentioned in the previous endnote, apparently had a copy of this very article of Isaiah’s from Christian Witness when she wrote her brief Covenanter history for The Salem Democrat, because she quotes verbatim Isaiah’s words: “…in the winter when the doors were closed, someone has said, ‘it was gloomy enough to suggest a prison rather than a temple.’” Burcham also adds her own personal memory of the rough-hewn sanctuary: “It was a very primitive affair built of logs, with one window in the north and one in the south, a door in the east and one in the west….The floor was made of slabs or puncheons, the roof of clapboards.” ↩
- “Uncle” and “Aunt” were terms not especially reserved for blood relatives in the Covenanter community of Walnut Ridge. They seem to have been used of any adults other than one’s parents. At least three people mentioned in this book—Uncle Archie (see chapter 11), Uncle Tippen (mentioned in the text of this chapter), and Uncle and Auntie McClaskey (see chapter 12)—bore this familiar title, though they were not relatives. In the case of the McClaskeys, they were not even Covenanters. ↩
- “Amen corner” seats were (and are) to be found in inner-city missions, camp-meeting tabernacles, revival-meeting tents, and the churches of vocal evangelical, holiness, and Pentecostal congregations. Usually the most devout and enthusiastic believers sit in the front pews or seats, shouting their “Amens” and other words of encouragement and agreement to the preacher. The author, by the time he wrote these words, had spent nearly three decades as a traveling holiness evangelist and had plenty of experience with “Amen corner seats” from both sides of the pulpit. In contrasting his current experience to his Covenanter-church experience, he is being wry and ironical by his use of the term. Yes, Reid’s family sat in the front pews, but, no, nobody could imagine shouting “Amen!” or “Glory, hallelujah!” during the preaching (or at any other time!) in a solemn Covenanter service. (Contrast this with the experience of “Uncle McClaskey” in chapter 12 on page 59.) ↩
- Photo of Thomas Reid courtesy of the Dorothy Reid Daggett Collection.
Isaiah Reid’s son, Edwin Reid, wrote these words of his Grandfather Thomas: “Thomas Reid was born in 1802… died at the age of ninety-two… …was a remarkable man in faith and religious character. From earliest youth he was a staunch Covenanter. He received a fair education, and with his native ability attained to what might be considered as a self educated man.”
- Isaiah’s father, Thomas Reid, was a ruling elder in the Walnut Ridge assembly; hence he (and his family) held the seat of honor on the front pew. Indeed, such was the “esteem in which he was held by his brethren” (according to one of his 1895 obituaries) that he was elected ruling elder in each successive church in which he was a member (those being Sharon Church in Des Moines County, Iowa, and the Reformed Presbyterian Church in nearby Morning Sun, Louisa County, Iowa). Of such godly stock came our Isaiah Reid. ↩
- A precentor is one who leads the singing of the congregation in a church. ↩
- Samuel was one of Isaiah’s four brothers, two years Isaiah’s junior, and therefore closest to him in age. ↩
- Samuel Reid died in July 1898, slightly less than four years before Isaiah published “The Old Log Church” in his “Beyond the Mississippi” section in Christian Witness. ↩
- The Solemn League and Covenant deserves far more than a quick endnote. Briefly, it was an English Civil War alliance between the Presbyterian Scottish Covenanters and Parliament, against King Charles I and his forces. For the Scots, the ultimate goal was to legalize and spread Prebyterianism in the kingdom. ↩
- “As the crow flies,” the distance from the Thomas Reid home to the log-cabin church, was only two-tenths of a mile. That’s easy for a crow, perhaps, but, speaking from the editor’s personal experience, a straight-line walk would have required a descent into a steep, rocky, wooded ravine, followed by a corresponding steep ascent to the plat on which the house of worship was erected. But even looping north around the ravine would have only doubled the distance to four-tenths of a mile. ↩
- Threnody is the second of Isaiah’s three unique nature words. Strictly defined, it means a lament for the dead in the form of a song, poem, or speech. When Isaiah uses the word, it is almost always in reference to the sound of the wind in the trees that surrounded both the church plot and its adjacent cemetery. So, to the author’s young imagination (and to his older, later memories of his childhood home), the whispering or gentle blowing of the wind through these tall trees took on solemn, sacred, reverential, threnodial (there’s the adjectival form of the word) overtones. ↩
- Reid family photo courtesy of the Dorothy Reid Daggett Collection ↩
