Northwestern Bible School - Scroll Yearbook (Minneapolis, MN)

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not only drowned out his crops, but so swelled the rivers as to literally wash away his livestock ; while the short experience of Indiana residence, ending as it did, had sufficed to complete the state of poverty and land us back on my father ' s native soil, depleted alike in purse and prospects. Boyhood and Farm Life The earliest memory is associated with the Kentucky farm in Boone County. It was not owned; it was rented. The house in which we lived in 1865 was a log cabin. My memory is that it had two rooms and a kitchen in the form of a lean-to. There were then three girls and four boys t the mother and father—a family of nine, so it must have been a full house.” Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, January I, 1863, shook the entire social fabric of the South, and practically demolished its financial system. White men who had done but little of honest labor, now stripped of servants, sought other vocations than farming, and the result was that half the places were offered for rent; the Rileys moved from the log cabin to the Scott farm, a frame building of seven or eight rooms, and undertook the diversified task of raising enough wheat for Hour; enough corn and oats and hay for stock feed; enough cane for sugar and sorghum; enough hogs and sheep to provide abundant meats and some for the market, and enough tobacco to bring in the needful cash for rent, clothing, and education. In my ninth year father told me I could “make a hand.” That meant that I could follow the plow from morning until night, and I did it; and from that date until I was ordained as pastor of the First Baptist Church, Carrolton, Kentucky, I made a hand,” and the fullness thereof grew with my growth. Beyond debate, my dear father was the most ingenious man in finding a job for every member of the family and every fellow that came near him, that I have known in a lifetime. He had us at the breakfast table at five o’clock, winter and summer, and aside from the uncertain days at school, wc knew but little rest between that early hour and about eight in the evening, summer months, nine or after. The removal to Owen County in 1872 and the purchase of a farm of 120 acres accentuated his activities in this matter of setting and keeping every member of his family busy, and if Edwin Markham’s poem, “The Man with the Hoe ' had any measure of truth in it, my face would never have been lifted toward the skies, but “With the emptiness of ages in it ” and “7 he burden of the world on my back My loosened jaw let down” the hot breath of the Kentucky August would have “Put out the light within my brain” You will remember, however, that John Vance Cheney wrote an answer to Markham’s misguided reflections, and presented our brother with the hoe as he “Leaned there , an oak where sea winds blow , . No blot, no monster, no unsightly thing. The soil’s longdineagcd king!” and I insist that though I hoed beans, hoed cabbage, hoed corn, and hoed tobacco in summer, together with every green thing that a garden grew or a farm could produce, and with that same hoe cut stalks on frosty winter morn-

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A SKETC1HI «S F MY LHFE By W. B. Riley Ancestry and Birth I N THE Garden of Eden where my original ancestors dwelt, there arose a river and it parted and became into four heads,” and every son of Adam has four direct streams of blood coursing through his veins. On my father ' s side they were Irish and Scotch—Riley and Bridges; and on my mother ' s side, English and Dutch-—Jackson and Hayes. My father was Branson Radish Riley; my mother, Ruth Anna Jackson. It is not the province of this paper nor the purpose of its author to prove royal, or even aristocratic ancestry. So far as I know anything of the Riley family, the more remote ancestors were plain Irish farmers, and when my great-grandfather came to America he settled in Culpepper County, Virginia, whence my grandfather moved to Boone County, Kentucky, the county in which I ha d my bringing up until the twelfth year, and thereafter in Owen County, a place but forty miles distant from the spot of my father ' s birth. Professionally, the younger generation of Rileys were medical men. Two uncles, two first cousins, one double cousin, and my oldest brother, were all practitioners of the old, or allopathic school. My mother ' s people, particularly those on her father ' s side, played promi¬ nent part in early Pennsylvania, and the record of the Jackson house is written into the history of that and adjacent states, not only in leading educational and business enterprises such as Swarthmorc College, the Jackson-Sharp Ship Builders of Wilmington, Delaware, the Miller-Lock Company of Germantown and other enterprises, but also into its moral and ethical life, for some of my Jackson ancestors were prominent exponents of both abolition and prohibi¬ tion; and being Quakers, they were, of course, ardent advocates of nat ional and international peace. My own birth occurred in Greene County, Indiana, March 22nd, 1861- I have no memory of the humble house in which I spent the first year, or pos¬ sibly two, of personal existence. Owing to the intense feeling, amounting to unrestrained anger, daily brawls, and nightly quarrels and even fights, over the then-burning questions of slavery and state ' s rights, my father, who was a Democrat and slavery sympathizer, counted it more healthful as well as more restful to return to the Southern side of the Ohio River Consequently, my youth knew nothing of any other state than old Kentucky—the state of fast horses, beautiful women, burley tobacco, and eloquent orators—the Brecken- ridges, Henry Clay, and others. It will be remembered that my birth occurred at a time when the entire country was ablaze with debate. Whether that pre-natal influence had any effect upon the child ' s futur e we leave to the psychologists, and if they fail to render a decision, then to the psychoanalyses, This much Is certain, that in less than thirty days after my birth the Civil War broke out. Fort Sumpter was fired upon and the Confederate and Union armies gathered for one of the most frightful domestic wars the world had seen. The few incidents of the war such as would appeal to a baby ' s mind, I remember vividly; but the main result of the same in Impoverishing the South, doubtless added to the comparative poverty to which my father had been reduced by an attempted residence in Missouri, where a series of rainy seasons [14] r T , -7 ’ « f 4 - Al ' u

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ings, it was a section of useful education from which I could not be caused to part for cash, and in the lingering memories of the same I find mental pleasure only ex¬ ceeded by the sweat I shed. Education is not necessarily a ques¬ tion of college life, I appreciate fully, I think, the contribution that normal school and college and theological seminary made to my mental equipment; but if any¬ one imagines that a farm is destitute of educational facilities and factors, it is a sure sign that he is either ignorant, or has been a signal failure as a farmer It was on that farm that I discovered the relation between sowing and reaping. It was on that farm that my feet and hands were trained to do the bidding of the intellect. It was to the corn stalks that I preached my first sermons, and while stripping tobacco on rainy days, that I solved more than one problem We some¬ times imagine that the modern farmer with his daily newspaper, his several magazines, his electric lighted study, his motor car, his Fordson and milking machine, is the first farmer that has ever had an intellectual opportunity. On the contrary, the open field has always been fruitful of men, and the one reason why the farm has made the finest contributions to the scholarly profession is found in the fact to which Cheney referred, namely, Bill Riley at the age of 14. (Reproduced from a tin-type ) “He is crowned whose kingdom is the ground” In the sixty years of my active memory, the overwhelming majority of so-called modern inventions and discoveries have been made — the electric light, the telephone, the telegraph, the weather bureau, the wireless, the auto, the tractor, the flying machine, the radio—I have seen the swaddling clothes of them all; and in this time farming has changed almost as radically as has transportation Machinery now does what hundreds of human hands formerly did, and the heavy labor, to which we were subjected fifty and sixty years ago, is no longer engaged in; viz , the felling of forests; the splitting of rails by the hundreds, yea, by the thousands; the swing of the old fashioned cradle and the cut of the old fashioned scythe; the long day through in the furrow following the plow, and above all, “the hoeing 7 Certainly Genesis is right, “Cursed is the ground. Thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee,” I have always wondered why Moses left out cattail, “pussy weeds,” and “Johnson grass,” for those were the enemies with which I fought all the days of my boyhood life. They were the menace of the tobacco patch—the solitary prospect of any considerable cash to the Kentucky farmer of fifty and sixty years ago Sidney Lanier, the Southern poet, when he penned the poem “Uncle Jim ' s Baptist Revival Hymn,” might have had in mind a Kentucky tobacco field as easily as a Georgia corn or cotton patch [ 16 ]