'A History in Maps' tracks Methodist insurgents along ancient local roads

"I assure you, it will not do to have the Methodist excitement raised in this country," wrote Stephen F Austin. . .

By HUDSON OLD
Journal Publisher

Maybe a thousand years back the Caddo built the first four-lane across the Geezerplex, a route noted centuries later in white settlers' deed records as the Cherokee Trace.

Read all about it in the Franklin County Historical Association's (FCHA) A History in Maps, a 20-page narrative brochure underwritten by the Texas Historical Commission (THC.) It's a compilation, a condensation of research boiled down to the core of stories told in thousands of pages and the corresponding books published by the FCHA over 20 years. It's an executive summary of the sort that allow high command to be well informed with a broad brush without having to trifle with finer points of the big picture.

Coming into Texas following the trails connecting villages along streams and rivers stretching from the Red River to the Angelina, a French traveler reported in 1767 that the main north-south artery of the Indian highway system was wide enough for four horsemen to ride abreast.

For 10,000 years, say THC archeological conclusions based on digs paid for by TXU, nomads following the harvest of nuts and berries had seasonal camps in East Texas. As they learned to farm, they settled. In Southwest Arkansas, Northwest Louisiana, Southeastern Oklahoma and East Texas, villages linked by culture, language and trade grew along streams.

In Franklin County, their north-south artery intersected the east-west Choctaw Trace.

The U.S. had been independent a scant 30 years or so before English-speaking colonists began flirting with the notion of settling Texas, defying Spanish and later Mexican claims.

Within that broader story is the tale of the subversive action of Methodists and Stephen F. Austin's fear of troubles with the Protestants.

These weren't your bake-sale, prayer breakfast, educational patron, civic activist, youth army Methodists of present day, and as early as 1813 A History In Maps documents arrival of a Methodist subversive in East Texas.

Subversive because Catholicism was more than religion - it was the law of the land and the Spanish were but a shade removed from the day of burning heretics at the stake.

Historically booked as "The Father of Texas," by the time Austin converted to Catholicism and cut a deal with the Mexicans to come to Texas, he was expressing open concern about Methodist circuit riders.

"They are too frantic, too violent and too noisy," he wrote. "The subject of preaching must be managed with prudent care for I do assure you that it will not do to have the Methodist excitement raised in this country."

Along the Red River, Pecan Point, to the north of Franklin County's Daphne Prairie, and Jonesborough, further to the east, became ports of Anglo entry to Texas.

A Methodist Camp meeting was included in the news from a Kentuckian on the Texas frontier, W.B. DeWees. He wrote home from Jonesborough in the winter of 1818-19.

Having not attended church since leaving Kentucky, he wrote of traveling six miles to a Camp Meeting on the Texas side of the Red, at Spring Creek.

"A few words now for the society that inhabits this new country," he said. "We are a motley crew, emigrants from all parts of the world."

Three Methodist pastors delivered their message from an elevated stand, a boxed platform, preaching the gospel to "a considerable congregation for a new country like this."

It lasted days while at a nearby spring "there was another large party, most of the time, who had plenty of swamp water, even by the keg full. On the third day there was a considerable excitement at the stand; some persons professed conversion and there was a good deal of shouting. When the drinking party heard this, they also commenced shouting."

Armed with axes, the drinkers charged the stand, chopping it down, only to be later reconciled with the spirit of the meeting.

In 1837, a year after the army of the Texas Republic whipped the Mexicans at San Jacinto, a pastor named J.W.P. McKenzie made a considerable impression on Andrew Davis, a young military man at Jonesborough.

"I have known a great deal about common and military camp life, but had never been to any religious encampment or religious services," he wrote in his diary.

The crowd was seated, men, women and children in a quiet mood.

"Brother McKenzie was the only person who seemed to be in any trouble, restless, as though he stood on embers, running first to one end of the box, then the other. He talked loudly with gestures of the most violent nature. It all indicated some serious trouble and whatever the nature of the trouble, it was just reaching a crisis."

Deciding to avoid any conflict, Davis withdrew, but kept a wary eye on Brother McKenzie.

"All at once he bounded out of the box and ran around out of my sight. The congregation rose as a man - there! He's broke out of the box - the fighting will come off now. But just at the moment of my most intense alarm, there arose from the congregation the sound of music. It reverberated to the highest heaven and broke in mellow and melting tones among the boughs of the trees . . ."

The lively nature of Methodist works worked. In the 1870 census, 4 million Americans said they were Methodists, more than all the nation's Baptists, Presbyterians, Congregationalists and Episcopalians combined.

Along the Caddo Trace, one county north of its route across Daphne Prairie William Stevenson preached at Pecan Point in 1814. THC's Handbook of Texas History says Pecan Point was one of the two "first" Anglo settlements in Texas. Red River County Historian Rex Strickland says a dozen or so fugitives from justice settled there in the summer of 1811. In 1821, many of them traveled with Austin down the trace, becoming immortal in Texas history for joining The Old 300, colonists settling in the vicinity of San Augustine.

With but a small leap of faith, the romantic may link early settlement patterns referenced on page 8 of A History in Maps with the success of evangelizing Methodists on Daphne Prairie.

In a 1921 interview with Mt. Pleasant's Titus Times Review, Cornelia Ann Stewart-Smith said the first church at "Tranquil" was a 16 x 16 log sanctuary completed in 1843. (Other accounts cite 1841) That was the story of her father, Captain Charles S. Stewart, remembered as one of the settlers leading a military campaign to drive the Indians from East Texas following the Ripley Massacre, 1841.

In the 1880's, the church was moved - rolled on logs, it's said - about two miles to land given by Edmund Jones and Minerva Webb Killingsworth. A weekly service continues at 9 a.m. Sundays. Edmund and Minerva's great grandson, Tom Wilkinson, is a regular.

It's gone the way of most country churches, surviving in recent years on life support from the larger Methodist world, covered-dish homecomings and sheer tenacity, at times down to a half dozen in attendance.

It's easy, reading FCHA's new brochure, to get sidetracked, to go ambling down ancient lanes past an old cemetery, a tenacious church, following threads of tales linked like the webs of Indian trails flowing to the Caddo Trace.

Unfortunately, the brochure looks like any number of things from the literature bins of a tourist stop, which just means if you get your hands on one, lecture the family. Put it with the first stuff you'll grab in case of fire.

Fifteen minutes with this thing and you may intelligently discuss the possibility that the Caddo Trace meandering through the Geezerplex was followed by Moscoso, that the remnants of LaSalle's doomed wreck at Matagorda Bay passed here.

From survey maps to the centuries old work of early cartographers, here's a taste of a tale nutshelled from the times of the ancients to the passing of the first national east-west highway, right past the town squares of Mt. Vernon and Mt. Pleasant - 1919.

Better yet, there's no test, just an invitation to be intrigued, to travel to Tranquil Cemetery, to scent the breeze weaving spirit through the tale of Texas.

Seated on high ground, the cemetery is particularly stark, Tom Wilkinson has written, set off against a regionally unparalleled view of horizons stretching away both east and west. It's a fine place to watch a winter sunset.

"To be there alone at that moment, I can imagine only that whoever named Tranquil must have experienced the same sense of peacefulness," he said.

Couple that thought with the church, a congregation rising to 20 in recent months, a remnant of pioneers at its core warming ancestral pews.

They live in the past in a way, resisting the mega-church lure. In a way more important, the past lives with them.

While they last, copies of "A History in Maps," compiled by Mt. Vernon attorney B.F. Hicks, are available at the East Texas Journal, 119 East 6th.