Northwestern Bible School - Scroll Yearbook (Minneapolis, MN)

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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.

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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 ]

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Left alone in the room we had occupied together, I was fortunate enough to secure a man to share the room with me who had recovered from home¬ sickness, and the rest of the school year moved more satisfactorily. However, it was not a year of financial flourishing; my board cost me $L45 a week, my room considerably less. I had gone to school with a two- dollar trunk, and a $13.00 suit. It was dark blue with a brown stripe in it and I wore it all the week; borrowed an iron of my landlady and pressed it Satur¬ day nights for Sunday wear. Before the year closed, the seat of the trousers gave away; but with the suit there came, according to custom, some pieces of goods off the same bolt, and so I patched, carefully striving to keep the patch above the coat-tail line. More than once I had to be careful about letter writing, lest I should not be able to scare up an additional three-cent stamp with which to make a further appeal to my father to send me a few dollars more of my tobacco crop balance. The lessons were extremely difficult. I had had only the advantages of country schools and my attendance there was not regular, owing to the farm work which often kept me at home for days together. The Latin I had never seen until that year and the dead language seemed to me to be worse than dead; it was “rotten.” The main event of the year lent assistance and inspiration beyond the conception of those who participated in it. My first Sunday in Valparaiso I went to the Baptist Church and learned to my delight that the pastor’s name was Rev. Edward S. Riley. His audience was not large and he spotted me as a stranger, came down to the pew where I sat, shook hands cordially, and asked me where I came from. When he found out who I was, he invited me home with him and taught his children to claim me as a kinsman. I suspect that that single fact saved me from surrendering the attempt at education and returning with my homesick roommate to old Kentucky. By the spring of 1880 I had accomplished sufficient to secure a teacher’s certificate, and later, in the summer, secured my school on Possum Ridge. However, when the season for school opening approached in 1880, the serious illness of my brother Theophilus, twenty-one months my junior, and the young man to whom the leadership of the farm would naturally fall, pre¬ vented my teaching. His attack was that of typhoid fever; it lasted many weeks and left him unfitted for work that autumn; hence the delay of further schooling for a year. By this time the profit of the tobacco sales was used up and how to get to school became a problem. When discouragement was complete, and I had decided to secure another school and teach, a kindly providence opened a better way. In the autumn of ' 81 a big-hearted, well-to-do farmer in Boone County, Kentucky, James T. Mason, who had known me from my birth, offered to lend me money to complete my college without respite, and also to provide that money without interest. The college selected for my training was Hanover, Indiana. It was one of the oldest of the western Presbyterian colleges and was located five miles out of Madison, in the little village of Hanover, on the crest of a hill by the Ohio river, one of the most beautiful and picturesque spots ever selected for a college. It was near “the Clifty” and other falls made famous by the author of Hoosier School Master. Here I put in four strenuous but delightful years. All my fellow students had enjoyed the advantage of high school training, [ 18] 2