"Father Clark," or The Pioneer Preacher

by John Mason Peck

“Yes, they duz,” responded Susan, whose whole soul had become enlisted in the mysteries of the new spelling book.

“Now, Susy, let me hear you read your lesson for to-morrow.”

Susan had just commenced the table for “easy readings,” and of course she had to proceed with great care. She took her station by her uncle, with the new copy of Webster in one hand, and pointing the fore-finger of the other to the word as her eyes passed along the line, she read slowly and distinctly, without missing three words:

“No man may put off the law of God;
My joy is in his law all the day.
I must not go in the way of sin.
Let me not go in the way of ill men.”

“Well done, Susan;—you are right smart, and do your master much credit.”

Time passed away;—the school increased, until the dirty old cabin was more than crowded. During the warm season, those who studied their lessons (and this was one of the new fashions introduced), could retire to the shade of the forest, and in groups of two, three and four, might have been seen by passers by, intently conning their lessons. But cold weather approached, the people became quite spirited in providing a new and better house for winter; and the whole settlement turned out with their axes and teams. Large trees were felled in the adjacent forest, and rough hewn on two sides to a suitable thickness. Clap boards, four feet long, were split from a straight grained oak for the roof; the ends of the logs were securely notched together and were placed one on top of another, as the four sides of the house were raised. In a few days a commodious house, about twenty feet square, and covered in, stood a few yards from the old log cabin. The spaces between the logs were soon “chinked and daubed;” that is, filled with small flat stones and chumps of wood, and mud plastered over the cracks both within and without.

For windows, a log was cut out from each side at a suitable height for the light to shine on the writing desks, which were slabs placed under the windows. The apertures were a foot wide and extended the length of the room, over which paper saturated with coon oil was placed as a substitute for glass. The chimney was built in the end opposite the door, and ran up outside of the wall. An aperture about ten feet wide was made through the logs for the fire-place. The chimney was built of rough stones from the neighboring quarry. And as quite an advancement in the style of frontier school houses at that period, planks, as the term was in Kentucky, or boards an inch and a quarter thick, cut at a saw-mill on a branch of Crab Orchard Creek, made a tight floor. It is doubtful if out of Lexington, and a half-dozen other towns, a school house existed in the country settlements with any other floor than the natural earth beaten hard, until this improvement was made both as an accommodation and a compliment to their teacher.

Mr. Clark had two or three young men from eighteen to twenty years of age, who had been under his tuition from the opening of the school, and who desired to qualify themselves for teachers. They were good tempered, affable, constant in their studies, and made good progress. The school now promised to have a greater number and variety of pupils than Mr. Clark could attend to and do justice to all. He proposed to these young men to assist him in the smaller classes, and by that means they would be qualified the sooner and the more thoroughly to teach and govern a school.

Time sped on, and Christmas, the real holiday amongst Southern people, was approaching. We are anxious to know how the tact and skill of Mr. Clark in governing rude, thoughtless, overgrown boys and precocious young men availed him on Christmas week; and as happened with other teachers in those days, whether he was “turned out” of the new school house by his mutinous subjects.

“To the time whereunto the memory of man runneth not,”—so reads the law phrase,—a custom had prevailed amongst the southern youngsters, that as Christmas approached, the authority over the school house was reversed; the young folks seized the reins of government. Judge Lynch held his court, and pronounced the authority from ancient traditions, that the pedagogue must resign all authority with the school house itself, until the holiday season was over, and make up the lost time at the close of his term.