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189 Why I Make Use of This Newspaper 189 CHAPTER 6 Why I Make Use of This Newspaper I desired to attain an approximation to preaching in the street, or to bring Christianity, the thought of Christianity, into the mind of life’s reality and into conflict with its various interests. And to that end I resolved to use this journal. —Søren Kierkegaard Charles Dickens once wrote of the best of times and the worst of times, the age of wisdom and the age of foolishness, the epoch of belief and the epoch of incredulity, the season of light and the season of darkness, the spring of hope and the winter of despair. In almost the same vein, John Augustus Williams once romanticized a certain eastern Kentucky community as a place wherein “there was not, at that time, a nobler citizenship in all the land,”1 and Jilson and Dulcinea Payne’s niece Mary Harrison wrote with perfect vitriol of the same hamlet as being “as usual, very dull and gloomy—the meanest place in the world—I keep myself very close. I visit nowhere scarcely for the place has become so notorious for slander, falsehood, and lies [emphases in original ] and I am determined to keep clear if possible. I have a perfect hatred of the place and would rejoice to bid it adieu forever.”2 Charles Dickens was, of course, portraying general conditions in Great Britain and France in 1775 in the prologue of his classic A Tale of Two Cities; Williams and Harrison were both specifically describing Mt. Sterling, Kentucky, in the early years of America’s Era of Good Feeling. And just as Dickens was correct on all counts about his subject, so were both of the Kentucky writers. Williams portrayed Mt. Sterling as being, if not paradise itself, a rung up the ladder in that direction , which was in fact the exact way Raccoon John Smith regarded the little east-central Kentucky town when he and his family arrived there in late 1817. And yet within and among its most noble citizenship there were tales to make one’s hair fairly stand on end: the postmaster seducing a local maiden and being forced to leave town temporarily when she got pregnant, his faithful and evidently extremely long-suffering and tolerant wife in tow; the town elite’s two most noted political leaders, “Captain” Henry Daniel and Judge David Trimble (the same one who opened the courthouse to the missionary Luther 190 Raccoon John Smith Rice in 1815, and himself possibly a member of North District Association at Daniel Williams’s old Sycamore Church), putting themselves a step above the rough-and-tumble eye-gouging and nose-biting fisticuffs of the Kentucky pioneers and fighting a duel, with “Captain” Daniel being seriously wounded but with no loss whatsoever of his propensities either for fighting or dueling; and a fatal stabbing at the courthouse door while court was in session, with the assailant’s course of action being formally approved because of the general contempt in which the victim was held.3 Mary Harrison thus regarded herself as a resident of a place nearly the exact opposite of paradise, but somewhere in between her writings and the hagiography ofWilliams we can get a tiny glimpse of Mt. Sterling as it really existed in those days: neither paradise nor purgatory but actually a warm, homey yet bustling southern town with one foot in the eastern Kentucky mountains and the other in the central Kentucky Bluegrass and likewise a conjunction of godliness and deviltry both shaped by and shaping the course of the continuing Great Revival, possessed of—or perhaps possessed by—the characteristics of our modern-day conceptions of Mayberry and Peyton Place, all jumbled together. Anyone’s impression either of early nineteenth-century Mt. Sterling, its modern-day legacy crisscrossed by U.S. Routes 60 and 460, or the thousand and one settlements just like it all across the rural Southeast both then and now, depends upon the press such places receive, and from what quarter. And so when Raccoon John Smith and his family first settled in Montgomery County, Kentucky, near Mt. Sterling, they came looking for a rung up the ladder to paradise, but as we rural dwellers all must, they ultimately settled into their own niche somewhere in between Mayberry and Peyton Place. Joshua and Sally Hurt and their children were a plain farm couple, present only because of the prospect of arable...

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