Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

54
ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
to the children, who walked most of the distance behind the
slowly moving cart. Through sun and storm they plodded
over the mountains and all the long road to their objective
point in Indiana. They drove their first stake a short distance
from the Ohio line on one of the long slopes of the Big
Miami Hills. Whitewater, FrankUn County, Indiana, was
their post office. The year of their removal from New York
was about 1821.
The preacher and the teacher were just coming into southern
Ohio and Indiana to grow up with the country. Our
mother had mastered "the three R's — Readin', 'Ritin' and
'Rithmetic," and so she collected the backwoods children
together and taught them. Here, too, we find, she did another
kind of pioneer work, not in clearing the stony fields of nature
this time, but in planting useful seeds of knowledge in neglected
young minds.
The religious awakening of the time reached the home of
our maternal grandparents as well. They, too, saw the
itinerant preacher on horseback with saddle-bags swung behind
his saddle, his horse stumbling over logs and stumps as
he looked up his scattered people. It was a great day when
Joseph Trowbridge came to the little hamlet on the Miami
known as Miamitown, near which our mother and her parents
were living. This preacher of the olden time was a "Bible
Christian," or of the "Old Christian Order." His theme,
too, was "the Bible and the Bible alone," without creeds or
confessions of faith. Our mother liked this presentation, for
the Bible was already her Book. Though an earnest believer
in its teachings, she had not become a member of any denomination.
When she heard Joseph Trowbridge's preaching
she concluded that she had found the body of behevers with
whom she could unite in sympathy. Before making a public
avowal she went to her mother to confide in her these convic-
tions.
Our grandmother objected because of the obscurity of the
people calling themselves simply "Christians," and expressed
a wish that her daughter should have a preference for the
Methodist Church, as it was popular. The day came, how-