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Elizabeth Madox Roberts 305 Janice Holt Giles from The Believers, Foreword Janice Holt Giles was not a native Kentuckian; she was born in Arkansas in 1909 and grew up there and in Oklahoma. She married Otto Jackson Moore, with whom she had one daughter, Elizabeth. A couple of years after her divorce in 1939, she moved to Kentucky to work briefly as a church secretary and then as a secretary to the dean at the Louisville Presbyterian Seminary. In the summer of 1943 she met Henry Giles while riding a bus to visit her daughter in Texas. After a lengthy correspondence during the war, Henry returned to Kentucky, and they married in Louisville the day he arrived and soon moved to his home in rural Adair County, on Giles Ridge near Knifley and Columbia. Although she was an outsider, she was quickly smitten with her husband’s people and their folk culture and began to write about them in novels, short stories, and nonfiction. The natives were polite and helpful enough, but they always looked upon her as an outsider, a person “from off,” as they put it. Moreover, it was not easy for her to adjust to life under the primitive conditions she found. Nevertheless , by the time of her death in 1979, her hugely popular books about Henry’s home county and people had made them known around the world. Giles’s novels fall into three distinct groups: the Piney Woods trilogy, consisting of The Enduring Hills (1950), Miss Willie (1951), and Tara’s Healing (1952); the Kentucky trilogy, consisting of The Kentuckians (1953), Hannah Fowler (1956), and The Believers (1957); and the several novels she wrote about Arkansas and the western frontier. The Giles Foundation, established in 1996, is dedicated to preserving the literary legacy of Janice and Henry Giles, restoring their log home near Knifley, and collecting and disseminating materials relating to the Giles legacy. The Believers is about the Shakers who came to Kentucky in the early 1800s and recruited converts into their celibate communities. In the selection that follows, her foreword to the novel, Giles explains the historical background for the characters and events. Since the time Giles wrote this foreword, the buildings in the community she describes have been converted into a Shaker museum. h Around 1800, a small fire was lit on the Gasper River in south-central Kentucky . It caught from the passionate zeal of two brothers, itinerant preachers from Tennessee, and quickly, with the heat, the rapidity and the intensity of a forest fire, it spread over all of the state, throughout Tennessee and on into much of the rest of the south. It was called “The Great Revival.” Such preaching, such passion and such zeal in religion had not before 305 306 The Kentucky Anthology been experienced, and people were caught up in its emotional raptures, taken with the jerks and shakes, dancing like dervishes, speaking in unknown tongues, weeping, wailing, barking like animals, crawling, rolling, going into trances. So great was the interest, so fast the spread, that within two years crowds of ten, fifteen, twenty thousand were gathering for these revival experiences. It created schisms in established churches and created new denominations, and it left its mark so that even today, in the hill country of both Kentucky and Tennessee, there are strange, emotional sects whose religion is most strongly characterized by the emotions and raptures of the revival practices. Hearing about this great revival “in the west” the queer, celibate group calling themselves The United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Coming , more commonly known as “Shakers,” determined that this was the land seen in vision by their great leader and founder, Mother Ann Lee. They sent their missionary teams into the country and made converts. Eventually two communities were founded in Kentucky. One was located near Harrodsburg on Shawnee Run. It was called Pleasant Hill. The other was situated on the Gasper River, south and west of Bowling Green. Its name was South Union. This book concerns the latter. All of the central characters are fictional, but Brother Benjamin, Brother Rankin, Sister Molly, the missionaries, are quite real. From journals, diaries, biographies, and from study of the actual location of the village, I have tried to recover the daily life as it was lived there. Most of the incidents which are worked into the plot have their origin in actual happenings. Not all of them occurred at South Union, but they did occur in...

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