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

by Unknown

ELIJAH KELLOGG: THE BOY

George Lewis

It is much easier to read the boy after you see and know the man than it is to read the man when you see and know only the boy. Manhood may be the unfolding of the various forces and dispositions of boyhood, but this unfolding must take place before the boyhood itself can be comprehended. The mill must grind the wheat into flour and the flour be baked and eaten before we can know how good the kernels of wheat are. So we must see Elijah Kellogg as a man before we can fairly estimate him as a lad. When we hear him preach or when we read some of his books, then we know there was something in him when a child more than mere roguery and fun. Genius was there. Powers and faculties were there which, when trained by judgment and directed by piety, made him the preacher to whom men and women loved to listen, and the writer of books that captivated the hearts of all boys.

This man first saw the light May 20, 1813, in a house on Congress Street in Portland, Maine, where dwelt the pastor of the Second Congregational Church of the city. The baby was called Elijah because that was the father’s name; and the father at his birth had been called Elijah because of the famous prophet in Israel who bore the name. At the father’s birth it was said by his parents, “We must have a prophet in the family.” So the name Elijah was given to the boy and he proved a prophet not in name only, but in reality as well. The Rev. Elijah Kellogg, pastor of the Second Congregational parish in Portland during the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries, was no mean representative of the old Hebrew prophet. The famous name sat well and appropriately upon the younger man. Had the Rev. Mr. Kellogg lived in the days of Ahab, of infamous memory, we may be very sure he would have stood beside the old prophet in his stout resistance to that wicked king; and had the Hebrew prophet been born in New England in the eighteenth century he would have sympathized warmly with his young namesake as he buckled on his belt and beat the drum for the patriots at the battle of Bunker Hill, and put forth all his skill and strength to free the colonies from the selfish and tyrannical rule of George III. There never yet was a true prophet of God in any land whose heart did not beat warmly for larger popular liberty and for a higher type of righteousness. Every prophet looks toward a sunrising that shall bring to earth a better day.

Elijah Kellogg, Sr., was but a boy at the opening of our Revolutionary struggle, but he was a boy of high spirit, of dauntless courage, and of most generous impulses. He derived these qualities of character from two distinct sources. These sources were, first, his ancestry, and second, the neighborhood where he was born, viz., South Hadley, Massachusetts. A boy could hardly be born and reared in the atmosphere of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, especially around Northampton and the Hadleys at that period of time, and be anything other than a freedom-loving patriot. It was a region of country favorable to the growth of heroes. Settled by stanch and sturdy Puritans, its people had for many years been sternly disciplined by the Indian troubles. No pusillanimous and faint-hearted men could by any means live long in that section. Only men of courage and strength could abide there. The Kelloggs proved what stuff they were made of, for the family had been living there for more than a century when Elijah came upon the scene. They were there when the regicide judges, Whalley and Goffe, pursued by the rancorous hatred of Charles II., sought an asylum in New England. Those men came first to New Haven for shelter, but even there they were not safe from the emissaries of the king. The protection, however, that New Haven could not afford them, Hadley could. Among the steel-hearted men of that up-river country they found safety. In that region was an association of liberty-loving souls, which, better than woods and better than caves, made life safe for those men who had helped behead a faithless king and had thereby given the cause of political and religious freedom a great uplift. Some towns are vastly better for boys to be born in than other towns are. South Hadley was one of the “better towns,” where Elijah Kellogg, Sr., saw the light for the first time in the year 1761.

Furthermore, there was good blood in the Kellogg veins irrespective of their geography. They were a worthy race anywhere and in all circumstances. Among the ancestors of this prophet-named lad were men who had borne the banner of the cross in Palestine with Richard of the Lion Heart, and others who had been true and stanch men in the Wars of the Roses and during the great reigns of Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth, and still others there were who a little later for their conscience’ sake had come to America. With such an ancestry as that and with a birthplace like South Hadley, it is no wonder that we find young Kellogg at Bunker Hill, where were fired the opening guns of the Revolution; or that a little later he endured the privations of Valley Forge and fought at Monmouth. He was, however, formed for scholarship rather than for military life, and after the war he entered and graduated at Dartmouth College. In 1788 the Second Church of Portland gave him a call to their pastorate. He accepted the call, and after this time Portland was his home as long as he lived.

Elijah Kellogg, Jr., had a good deal come to him from his father’s side of the house. He also had a good deal come to him from his mother’s side. This mother of his had once been Eunice McLellan. Her father was Captain Joseph McLellan and her mother was Mary, daughter of Hugh and Elizabeth McLellan, who had been among the earliest settlers of Gorham, Maine. Eunice, therefore (Mrs. Kellogg), was a McLellan of the McLellans. The family were Scotch-Irish people, and were descended from old Sir Hugh, who was knighted in the year 1515, and the race was one of strong family characteristics. Even at the present time they are somewhat clannish, and to this day throughout New England the name McLellan is regarded by him who bears it as a sort of patent of nobility; and all agree that there are few if any names in the country more worthy of respect and honor than that one.

Joseph McLellan was a born sailor if ever there was one, an adventurous rover of the seas, always happiest when on blue water with a good ship under his feet and a stiff breeze blowing him along his course. This man sent his own disposition down the family stream, and gave to his grandson Elijah a generous share of that same roving and adventurous spirit. The story is told that on the birth of an infant daughter to Joseph and Mary the parents decided to call her Esther, or as it was pronounced in those days, Easter. The babe was taken to the church that she might be baptized at the hands of the Rev. Mr. Deane. At the font the name of the child was handed to the clergyman, Easter, upon which he broke out, “Easter! Easter! That is no good name for a girl. Call her after my wife. Call her Eunice. Eunice, I baptize thee,” etc. The deed was done, and the child was Eunice in spite of both father and mother. The baby thus curiously named became in due time the wife of Parson Kellogg and the mother of the subject of this sketch. The McLellans were a canny folk. They had fought for Scottish liberty in many a sharp tug with the Saxons in the old days. They had helped fight the battles of the Covenanters at a later period, and now in the eighteenth century, transferred to America, they still kept up the fight and played their part on many a field, from Bunker Hill to Yorktown.

Blood will tell. Family traits will be transmitted. Sons will in some degree resemble sires. With an ancestry on both sides like that sketched above, it is no great wonder that the subject of this volume became the man he did. He had a good start. There was in him a goodly fund of inherited gifts. In the book,“Good Old Times,” which is Mr. Kellogg’s story of the McLellan family (his grandmother’s branch of it more particularly), the author lets us see how largely his own personal character was formed and his whole life influenced by the traditions and stories of the men and women of the family, recounted as those stories were at the fireside in the winter evenings, and told over again in the daytime as men and boys were doing their work in the woods and in the fields. The boy was perfectly happy when listening to these tales of pioneer life, made up as they largely were of homely and commonplace incidents and yet of really adventurous deeds. They were tales of conflict with the Indians, in which the McLellan fairness and good sense always won the respect of the savages and in most cases secured their good will and good treatment; of encounters with bears and wolves and other wild beasts, where man’s craft and skill gained the victory; and experiences with cold and hunger and hardships of the wilderness, in which Christian faith and the McLellan pluck overcame all odds and achieved a good measure of prosperity. Things like these were the folk-lore of the Gorham people rather than stories of round tables and fairies and ghosts and witches. This boy, like Carlyle, came to have a great admiration for the “man who could do things.” The ideal hero of Elijah Kellogg’s early boyhood was the hearty, warm-hearted, rough-handed, whole-souled pioneer who never turned his back upon a foe, whether biped or quadruped, and who never blenched in the face of a difficulty or a danger. He was the man who had in himself resources that were always called out and brought into exercise when obstacles were encountered, and invariably rose superior to the obstacles and made the man complete master of the situation, however bad that situation appeared. As he would have phrased it, he liked the man who never got whipped. The white man who could outwit an Indian or outhug a bear or outrun a pack of wolves was a man to be admired. The man who could fell a forest and clear a farm and put the soil to the production of corn and wheat was a man to be admired. This hero of Kellogg’s childhood was never entirely dethroned from the heart of the man. To the end of his days he loved that man who, using his own native strength, could bridle and ride the storm, or over the rudest billows of the ocean could bring his vessel into port.