Elijah Kellogg, the Man and His Work / Chapters from His Life and Selections from His Writings

by Unknown

One Sunday during these first years of his pastorate, just after reading the usual notices, he said: “Widow Jones’s grass, I see, needs mowing. I shall be in her field to-morrow morning at half-past four with scythe, rake, and pitch-fork. I shall be glad to see all of you there who wish to come and help me.” The next morning found a good crew of men and boys in the field ready for work. Among them was a man six feet two in his stocking-feet and weighing some 250 pounds. Captain Griggs we will call him. As they were working up the field near each other, the captain said, “Parson, I am going to cut your corners this morning.” The little wiry parson, who had served a good apprenticeship upon his uncle’s farm in Gorham, whet his scythe and kept his counsel. The big captain didn’t cut any of his corners that day. Indeed, the story goes that before noon the man who thought that he could mow around the parson, dropped under a tree, exhausted by the terrific pace that Kellogg set.

Before he had completed the first year of his ministry, Mr. Kellogg was elected a member of the school committee, on which he served several years. That he sought to do his duty on the school board faithfully is attested by the resolution—heroic it will seem to some—which he recorded on December 8, 1844. “Having never till this time been fully convinced of the importance of mathematics in strengthening the mind and preparing it to investigate truth, and never having been able to conquer my dislike for them till led to them by the study of philosophy and an impression of the interdependence of all philosophy and all science, I now begin at the bottom and determine to push my researches as far as possible and to set down whatever may be worthy of note. I this day commenced Emerson’s Arithmetic in order to be prepared to do my duty thoroughly as one of the superintending committee.” As committeeman, he did more than make a perfunctory visit twice a term. He kept his eyes open for the alert, promising, studious lad. Such a boy he encouraged, advised concerning his studies, and often urged to go to Master Swallow’s school in Brunswick and fit for college. These boys he picked carefully, for he didn’t believe in “wasting nails by driving them into rotten wood.”

From the first of his ministry to the very end, Mr. Kellogg showed an instinctive knowledge of boys, and originality in dealing with them. Any just estimate of his work and character must rate high his tact in handling and influencing boys. Wherever he preached, boys were quick to see that he was their friend, a man after their own heart. They soon found that this unconventional, simple, eloquent little man, who had a way of throwing his arm over a boy’s shoulder and walking home from the evening meeting with him, was more than an ordinary preacher. They found that he could understand them. They could tell him their jokes and their serious plans, and he could see through their eyes and hear through their ears. They found that he, more perhaps than any other man they had ever known, was all the time at heart a boy himself; that he was interested in them not simply as a professional duty, but because he couldn’t help it. He loved boys, was happy in their companionship, and delighted to talk of his own boyhood and college days,—of the time when the frogs by croaking “K’logg, K’logg,” called him away from school, or when he in recitation informed his dignified professor that Polycarp was one of the many daughters of Mr. Carp. He would swim and sail and farm and fish with the boys in his parish, and then, at an unexpected moment, but in a manner not repellent, he would kneel down in their boat or in the field by the side of a cock of hay or a shock of corn and pray with them.

Many men to-day who were born and bred in Harpswell like to tell of the way he won and kept their friendship. Here, for example, was a boy whom he was taking to Portland in his boat; the youngster felt very proud, for his grandmother had intrusted to him her eggs to take to market. But alas! in disembarking he dropped the basket, and the eggs were smashed. The boy’s extremity, however, was the preacher’s opportunity. By paying for those eggs from his own pocketbook, he saved the young marketman no end of humiliation, and bound him to his soul with a hoop of steel.

If one may judge by his journal and correspondence, no work that Mr. Kellogg did during his long life afforded him greater satisfaction or yielded larger returns in affection and gratitude and right living than his work with boys. When, for instance, he had been on Harpswell Neck less than a year, he heard that a schooner had put into Potts’s Point, some ten miles below his home, with a boy on board who had broken his leg. He knew that this boy on a small schooner in a strange place would need sadly the comforts of home. He hastened to him, brought him to his boarding-place, put him in his own bed, and nursed him as he would have nursed a son. When the boy was able to go to sea again, having no money, he could repay his benefactor for all the trouble and expense he had been, only with words of kindness and gratitude. Years afterwards, however, when Mr. Kellogg was preaching in Boston, a well-dressed man and woman came into the sailors’ church, and appeared much interested in the sermon. At the close of the service they came forward and spoke to the preacher. The boy had now become a man—the mate of a large ship. The bread which the young minister had cast upon the waters now returned to him after twenty years, in the words of affection and encouragement with which this man and his wife expressed their gratitude, also in the $50 which, as they bade him good-by, they left in his hand.

For some years Bowdoin College, recognizing Mr. Kellogg’s power in getting at the heart of boys, had the custom of sending to him some of the students whom it rusticated; and his strong, manly character brought more than one boy to his better self. That his treatment of these boys was not exactly that of Squeers, this instance will show. One young fellow whom the college sent him was especially rebellious at first. Through cheap story papers he had come cheek by jowl with old Sleuth and his boon companions, and he sought to emulate them by carrying a revolver and a dirk knife. Mr. Kellogg told him that as he would not find any Indians or many wild beasts down there, he had better surrender his weapons. This the young man did after much reluctance. During the first day, Mr. Kellogg left him to himself, as he was inclined to sulk. In the evening he began to talk to the boy indifferently at first, afterwards kindly. All the time—lover-like—he kept edging up nearer to him on the big sofa, and finally in his genuine, whole-souled way, put his hand affectionately on the lad’s shoulder. To such treatment the young fellow was not accustomed. It was so different from his over-stern father’s that it threw him entirely off his guard. He could not withstand the man’s kindly interest and genuine manner. His rebellious spirit was broken. The boy dreaded his father’s rebuke, and the next day, unknown to him, Mr. Kellogg wrote to his mother, telling all about her son and urging that the father write to him kindly and not sternly. A few days after this the young fellow was surprised and delighted to receive from home a letter of forgiveness and encouragement.

On July 4, there was to be a celebration in Portland. The boy wished but did not expect to go. “Well,” said Mr. Kellogg one day after they had been speaking of the matter, “I am afraid you can’t go. I have no authority to let you. But, then, I really want to attend that celebration myself, and I can’t be expected to leave you at home alone.” When the day of celebration came, the student and the preacher could have been seen tramping the streets of Portland, both, no doubt, having a right royal good time.

A few years ago, the heart of the aged minister was uplifted by the assurance that he had dealt aright with this high-spirited lad. A successful business man, the vice-president of a large western railroad, came many miles to look again into his kindly face and to tell him that those weeks of companionship full of honest counsel marked the turning-point in his life.

For the first five years of his life in Harpswell, Mr. Kellogg boarded at the home of one of his parishioners, Mr. Joseph Eaton. Here his mother spent the summers with him, his father having died in 1843. In 1849 he bought a farm of thirty-five acres at North Harpswell, and at once began to build a house that he might provide a suitable home for his lame and aged mother. The location of this house is an attractive one. It is on the western side of Harpswell Neck, a half-mile or so from the main-travelled road. From it the land slopes gently an eighth of a mile, perhaps, to the shore of Middle Bay. From the windows of the house which he here built, one peeping through the oaks and spruces on a summer’s day may see to the west, across the sparkling water of the channel, the green sloping bank of Simpson’s Point, or to the south Birch and Scrag islands and several of the other 363 which dot the waters of Casco Bay. The house itself is a wooden, two-story, L-shaped farm-house facing the west, bespeaking nothing of luxury, but large enough to be airy in the summer, and in the winter a good place, as Captain Rhines would say, in which to ride out the storm.