Northwestern Bible School - Scroll Yearbook (Minneapolis, MN)

Page 24 text:

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 ]

Page 23 text:

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-

Page 25 text:

My home m Union, Boone County, Ken¬ tucky, where I spent my early boyhood, and where my youngest brother Walter was born [Dr. Riley paid a spe¬ cial visit to Kentucky to secure this photo graph. This house is over 100 years old, and still retains its original appearance -] It was In the spring of 1879 that I rented my father ' s farm. I promised to pay all the expenses of the conduct of the same, and pay him a thousand dol¬ lars in cash when the crop was sold. It was an amount of net money that no year had ever yielded; but I was desperate in my desire for an education, and determined upon that method of testing myself and the promises of God, For a brief season that spring my prospects seemed doomed. I had plowed! With the aid of three of my brothers and mv father and the hired man, I had made ready and planted to tobacco twenty-four acres, a crop unknown, in size, to that neighborhood. On the Sunday morning before the church hour I walked the fields over and found that fully half of the plants lav dead by the work of cut-worms. I was in my eighteenth year, big enough to be a man, but so close to my babyhood that I laid me down in the open field and sobbed in infant style, and felt and said, as many another enterprising business man has felt and said, “I am ruined.” But Monday morning, instead of breaking bright and fair, brought a furious rain, the one thing of all possible occurrences that could he in my favor. I rode the neighborhood over and purchased the leavings of every tobacco bed in the vicinity, and, with the assistance of the farm contingent, set it out again; and this time more than twenty acres of it lived. The next year in the summer of ' 80. I sold on the market in Cincinnati at one time $1,700 worth of tobacco. The most of it was paid to me in $5.00 bills, and I took the entire roll and put it in my trouser pockets. They bulged as they had never bulged before; nor, sad to say, since! That same season I became a tobacco trader. I purchased two other crops at eight cents a pound, and sold them, together with a poor balance of my own, left behind at shipping time, at a price, which at that time was most unusual, twenty cents a pound, So I cleared all expenses, paid father his thousand dollars, and had a small balance left. With the balance in hand I set out for school at Valparaiso, Ind., where Dr. Brown had built up a unique Normal. The winter of 1879-80 at this Normal School was one never to be forgotten. It was a lad ' s first experience away from home, and his homesickness was severe. To add to the seriousness of his own attack, his roommate, who had come from Kentucky with him to the Valparaiso school, had a far greater siege of the same, and after four weeks of complaints, he quit school and returned to his country home.