Preachers and Enslavers

More family...
My mother's side, this time, who lived in the Mid-South––Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee––since colonists first pushed over the Appalachian Mountains.

I. Preachers

Yesterday I found online  The Mountain Preacher––digitalized by the Library of Congress––written by my great-grandfather (mother's father's father), James Lonzo Davis, and published in 1909.

Beautifully readable (or downloadable) at the Internet Archive:
archive.org/details/mountainpreacher00davi

I used to have a copy of it, and had even transcribed the whole thing onto computer in the late 1990s, before PDFs even existed. Strangely, I lost the book and the typescript, or I loaned it out and never got it back.
So I also ordered a beat-up copy of it off eBay ($14); I'd like to have a hard copy again.

Here're the opening lines:

My grandfather, Lytton, was this guy James's son.
James was a tyrannical father (and preacher--you can read in his book--he relished conflict with competing churches--and everyone was carrying rifles).

Here is the Davis family on their Kentucky farm, 1912. 

Left to Right:  parents Martha & James (the preacher), their daughters Pearl and Bertha (daughter Maude had already left), and son, (my mother's father), Lytton Somer Davis (1900-1976).

My grandfather hated his preacher father, ran away when he a teenager, and eventually married the daughter of a small-town lawyer, my grandmother Meribel--and they were the parents of my mother.

II. People Who Own People

While the preacher's family were hardscrabble hill people, Meribel's was middle class––doctors and lawyers, mostly.
But some landed gentry types in there too...

In fact, my mother always thought one branch of the family––the Hines––enslaved people, back when that was legal in the United States.

The other day, with a few minutes searching online, my sister found that branch.
She wrote to me:

"Florence Owsley, the aunt and adoptive-mother of our orphaned great-grandmother, (Virginia),  married into a slave-holding family.

"Florence married Virgil Hines, whose grandfather's uncle  was John Hines, who lived from 1771-1853.
From Western Kentucky Scholar:

'John Hines was unusually successful and accumulated a large fortune. He was sheriff of Warren County [southern Kentucky] for several years and was a large tobacco planter with about 3,000 acres of land and over 100 slaves.'

[Sister continues...]
"Woah. I'm kinda short of breath.
Dunno why I thought we wouldn't have a connection to slaver-holders, given the geographic roots of our maternal side of the family, but didn't realize I'd find it as quickly as I did. 

"So, from an initial online search--based on what was easy to find--it appears that the Hines side of the family (that would be thru Virgil Hines--Virginia Sutherland's uncle by marriage) dates back to the Revolutionary War, however many great-greats that is.
The progenitor of the Hines clan in America--Henry Sr--served in that war.

"The Hines family lived originally in colonial Virginia, and the next generation moved westward thru the Cumberland Gap to southern Kentucky (Bowling Green area, near TN border).
This is all historically slave country, though KY was a border state and never joined the Confederacy. 
Subsequent generations moved farther west to Missouri. 

"Henry Sr's son John built a saw- and gristmill (Hine's Mill) in the Bowling Green area, and 'was a large tobacco planter with about 3,000 acres of land and over 100 slaves.'

"So there we have it. Just to clarify, John Hines was the uncle of Virgil Hines's grandfather. I think.
So Florence Owsley, our great-grandmother Virginia's aunt [who raised Virginia after she was orphaned], married into a slave-holding family."

[end email from sister]

Well, that's what my mother thought, so I'd already taken the idea in, but it was indeed... just weird to see it spelled out, with names and places and numbers.
To "own" one hundred people, to use them to grow tobacco...

Photo from a Kentucky tobacco farm in 1940:

What an American mish-mash I am, colonists, preachers, enslavers, runaways and lawyers, 20th-century immigrants from Sicily. (The Sicilian immigrants were shoe makers and sewers, seamstresses, from towns near Palermo.)

So much...!