Rural Life and Culture in the Upper Cumberland

3. Saints, Sinners, and Dinners on the Grounds

Saints, Sinners, and Dinners on the Grounds 49 49 Chapter 3 SAINTS, SINNERS, AND DINNERS ON THE GROUNDS The Religious Legacy of the Upper Cumberland LARRY WHITEAKER In frontier days, Tennessee’s Upper Cumberland was, by all accounts, a rugged area of rivers and creeks, wooded plateaus, hills, and hollows. A raw-boned land, it attracted raw-boned people who, in turn, produced rugged preachers determined to “chase out Satan” and bring salvation’s message to the area. Bud Robinson, a traveling preacher said to have preached more than 33,000 times, captured this “grab ’em by the throat” approach in his famous prayer: “Lord, give me a backbone as big as a saw log, and ribs like the sleepers under the church floor; put iron shoes on me, and galvanized breeches. And give me a rhinoceros’ hide for a skin, and hang a wagon load of determination up in the gable end of my soul, and help me to sign the contract to fight the devil as long as I’ve got a fist, and bite him as long as I’ve got a tooth, and then gum him ’til I die. All this I ask for Christ’s sake. Amen!”1 This forceful, even belligerent, approach to religion characterized much of the early efforts to establish churches in the region, and traces of it can still be found in parts of the area today. Bands of Native American hunters no doubt conducted the first religious ceremonies in the Upper Cumberland, but the historical record is silent on these activities; even the archeological evidence of religious practices is sparse. According to one tantalizing legend, the “standing stone” monolith near the present city of Monterey in Putnam County had religious significance for Indians, but no proof of this has ever been found. 50 LARRY WHITEAKER The religious history of the region really begins in the 1790s, when settlers from the scattered Kentucky and Tennessee communities and new migrants from east of the Appalachians moved to the upper reaches of the Cumberland River. By 1805, when the Treaty of Hopewell ended Cherokee claims to the region, hunters, farmers, and others were already living in the area that became Smith, Jackson, Overton, andWhite counties, and some of the people were already participating in efforts to bring organized religion to their new communities. There is no agreement among historians on when settlers established the first church in the region, but virtually all contemporary records and historical commentaries agree that the frontier regions of Kentucky and Tennessee needed the civilizing influence religion offered . Threats from Indian raiding parties, outlaw bands, and the like were real and continued to be a menace into the nineteenth century. Dangers and hardships coarsened the men and women and gave them a reputation of being barbarians. One shocked visitor to the frontier described these people as rough-hewn types who lived in crude cabins built much like Indian wigwams and who depended more on hunting than on agriculture. For entertainment they “have frequent meetings for the purposes of gambling, fighting, and drinking. . . . They fight for the most trifling provocations, or even sometimes without any. . . . Their hands, teeth, head and feet are their weapons, not only boxing with their fists, . . . but also tearing, kicking, scratching, biting, gouging each others eyes out, . . . and doing their utmost to kill each other.”2 Fortunately for the settlers trying to bring religion to the Upper Cumberland, their arrival coincided with the spread throughout Kentucky and Tennessee of a religious revival called the Second Awakening . Characterized by camp meetings—where people numbering in the thousands gathered to hear preaching for several days and nights—the revival was also noted for fervent sermons depicting the horrors of hell and the joys of heaven and “exercises”—emotional outbursts on the part of the listeners that took the form of jerking, dancing, running, holy laughing, and “treeing the devil.” This Awakening began in Kentucky in the late 1790s and quickly spread into Sumner and Davidson counties in Tennessee and points eastward. This, in turn, led several religious bodies to start intense evangelizing in the area to bring the revival converts into their particular denomination.3 One of the earliest denominations to make its way into the Upper Cumberland was the Methodist Church. In the early nineteenth century , they were still relative newcomers to the American religious scene. Saints, Sinners, and Dinners on the Grounds 51 Arising...