Up from Methodism

ASBURY / UP FROM METHODISM
HERBERT ASBURY
ALFRED · A · KNOPF NEW YORK 1926
Copyright 1926 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Manufactured in the United States of America
TO STANLEY WALKER
ASBURY / UP FROM METHODISM
On my father’s side, according to my family belief, I am related to Cotton Mather; on my mother’s side to Roger Williams. My great-great-uncle was Francis Asbury, the first Bishop of the Methodist Church to be ordained in America; his elder half-brother was my great-great-grandfather, Thomas Asbury, who, disowned by his father for various sins, ran away from the family cottage in England and went to sea. Later he kidnapped Susan Jennings and married her, and then settled in Virginia and so escaped the fate of the Bishop, who doubtless went to the Methodist Heaven.
My great-grandfather was the Rev. Daniel Asbury of Fairfax County, Va., an early pillar of Methodism and one of the great organizers of the Church in the South. When a young man he went to North Carolina, and in 1791 founded, in Lincoln County, the first Methodist church west of the Catawba River. Later he was a Presiding Elder and labored valiantly for the Wesleyan God. When but a boy he was captured by the Indians and kept a prisoner for several years, and is said to have converted the entire tribe to Christianity. Throughout his whole life Sunday was his great day—he was born on Sunday, converted on Sunday, captured by the Indians on Sunday, released on Sunday, reached home on Sunday, was ordained as a minister on Sunday, and on a Sunday married Nancy Morris in Brunswick County, Va. His first child was born on Sunday and he died on Sunday.
My grandfather was the Rev. William Asbury of North Carolina, a local preacher who, for some reason that I have never known, quit raising souls to Heaven and moved over into Mississippi, where he had equally poor success raising coons and cotton. He married Susan Lester Marks, member of an equally religious family. Several of his seven sons were Methodist preachers, and my father, too, would have assumed the cloth had not the Civil War come along. He enlisted in the Confederate Army and became an officer of infantry, and infantrymen do not make good preachers. At the close of the War he studied Civil Engineering and then moved to Missouri, and settled in Farmington, where I was born. He was county Surveyor of my home county of St. Francois for more than thirty years, and City Clerk of Farmington for twenty years. The exigencies of local politics compelled him to attend services and take an active part in church work, but I have no recollection of him as a religious man, although he imposed religion upon his home and impressed upon his family the necessity of Christian salvation.