TRIBUTE TO J. H. SPENCER, HISTORIAN, ON THE
50th ANNIVERSARY OF HIS DEATH
By Leo T. Crismon, President
Kentucky Baptist Historical Society
Louisville, Kentucky, 1986
8(Editor's Note: This article was published in the 1947 ANNUAL of the General Association of Baptists in Kentucky now known as the Kentucky Baptist Convention. Since Baptists depend so heavily upon the history contained in the two volumes written by J. H. Spencer that it seemed appropriate to publish it in the Kentucky Baptist Heritage so the younger Baptists would know something of his life. It is so done in memory of Spencer and in memory of Leo T. Crismon who penned these words and to whom this issue is dedicated.)
The ancestors of John Henderson Spencer were English, coming by way of England, to Virginia, to South Carolina and Georgia, then to southern Kentucky as early as 1796. The name of one descendent of the family, Captain Spear Spencer, who fell in the battle of Tippecanoe in 1811, was given to a county in Kentucky and to another in Indiana.
John Henderson Spencer, son of William Spencer and Sally Caldwell Richey, was born September 9, 1826, in Allen County, Kentucky, a few miles southwest of Glasgow. He grew to young manhood in that and immediately neighboring communities. He states in his autobiography that his recollection of those early scenes went back to the time when he was only one year of age.
In a day and country where there were few schools and teachers, the story of his education reads like a romance, for a period of almost 25 years, - private schools, individual instructors, self education, college, himself teaching. An interesting item comes from his seventh or eight year. He had an uncle and an aunt who were feeble minded. He said that it occurred to him, as he heard grown up people discuss many things which he could not understand, that he did not know any more than "Uncle Mose" or "Aunt Kitty". For a long time he pondered the question as to whether he was an idiot, as his uncle and aunt were incorrectly styled. He argued that if he had "good sense" he should know as much as his parents and other people with whom he talked. He kept silent on the subject for very shame. Finally the idea occurred to him that people got wiser as they grew older, and that he might get to know as much as other men by the time he grew to manhood. He says that this thought greatly relieved and comforted him.
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Through his persistence and effort at learning, by the time he was twenty-one he knew more than any teachers in the community. So he then became a teacher himself, teaching a part of the year, and going to school in other months of the year, or studying at home. He also became interested in music, and began to study it, attending a night singing school, and learning to play a few instruments, including the flute, the accordion, and the violin.His father and mother were morally and religiously inclined, but not members of any church. However, his grandfather, John Spencer, was a Baptist and the clerk of Bethel Baptist Church (organized, 1808) in Allen County. Allen County was settled principally by Baptists from Virginia and the Carolinas. John H. Spencer had the benefit of their heritage and influence, though he did not have the opportunity to attend worship services frequently in his youth. On January 19, 1849, at a "protracted meeting" at Hopewell Baptist Church, he was converted, and joined the church the following day.
After conversion and church membership he continued his pursuit of learning, attending schools at Scottsville, Allen County. He then heard of Georgetown College, and determined to attend that school, but after arriving there by a rather round about way, from Bowling Green down Green River to Evansville, Indiana, then up the Ohio River to Louisville, by rail to Frankfort, then by stage coach to Georgetown, and having been examined by the faculty, he was told he was not qualified to enter college or to take even a course in English. That was in December, 1850, and he was twenty-four years of age. He stayed at Georgetown about four weeks, did some work in the preparatory department of the college, realized what further work was necessary to qualify himself, a whole year of study, the cost of a college education, etc., and with a heavy heart, turned his face towards home.
Since he had known no life except that of a farmer, he now decided to make this his life-work. But after one season, because of physical weakness, he turned to the school room again, then decided to prepare himself for teaching as a profession. In the fall of 1842 he went to Louisville and bought a small library, including history, science, and the classics, to help him in his preparation.
While he was absent on that occasion, Hopewell Baptist Church, to which he belonged, brought up the matter of licensing him to preach. There was some opposition, in that he played the flute, accordion, and worst of all the violin, and that he played "carnal tunes" on it. The matter was referred to a future meeting, and in April, 1853, with Dr. Spencer himself present, the church voted unanimously to license him to preach. He began immediately to preach at every opportunity, and on May 6, 1854, he was ordained by the same church. He then moved his membership from Hopewell Church to Bethel Church, the church of his ancestors. After his visit to Georgetown he had decided not to go to school any further, but having been ordained he felt the need of further preparation and began making plans to enter school again.
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So, a few days after his ordination, in his twenty-eight year, he started to Russellville to enter Bethel High School, later called Bethel College (1856). He stayed there a little more than two years, then, because of his physical condition, he left school to become missionary in Bays Fork (now called Allen County) Association, November, 1856, thus entering on a ministry, going from church to church and holding meetings, which he continued for almost forty years. In May, 1857, he attended the meeting of the General Association and of the Southern Baptist Convention in Louisville, and he met many Baptist leaders whose friendship he cherished the rest of his life.
For two years, October 1857 through October 1859, he was pastor of the church at Cloverport, but he soon decided that he was not fitted for the pastoral office. He said that during these two years he was practically a missionary in a broad field with Cloverport as the center, rather than the pastor of the church in that village. For nearly all the rest of his active ministry he served as an evangelist, either independently, or as a missionary, for Nelson Association(l861), Long Run Association (1864), or the General Association (1870), organizing new churches, reviving dead churches, strengthening weak ones, helping pastors in revivals (and on at least two occasions engaging in debate), in Kentucky, Indiana, Tennessee, Illinois,, Missouri and at one time going to Kansas and Colorado for his health (1873). He and A. B. Miller preached at old Long Run Baptist Church on Sunday, September 8, 1861, the day following a meeting of Long Run Association with that church, to an audience estimated at 5,000 people.
In his autobiography Dr. Spencer gives an interesting account of his marriage to Miss Alice Lavelia Everhart, daughter of Captain G. W. Everhart, a steamboat man on the Ohio River. He became engaged to her in March 1861. Later they set the date for the wedding for Sunday, September 15, 1861. On Thursday before,he met the captain in Louisville and obtained the license. On Saturday night he preached at Knob Creek in Bullitt County. On Sunday morning he rode to the house of Captain Everhart, and was married to his daughter before breakfast, by Dr. W. E. Powers. When they arose from breakfast, he says that he walked with his bride into the parlor, and without sitting down, he said to her, "Now, my darling, you are all of this world to me; but my duty to the cause of Christ is all of the next world." He says that he then printed the first kiss on her lips, bade her adieu and hurried away to his appointment at Knob Creek at 11:00 o'clock, and he did not see her again for six days. He went to Little Flock Church in Bullitt County on Sunday night where he had made an appointment to commence a protracted meeting for that time before the day for the marriage had been fixed. He closed the meeting on Friday night, then went back to Beechland on Saturday night, met his bride, and after preaching, went home with her.
In October, 1862, he accepted a call to the church at Henderson, Kentucky, and stayed with the church for fourteen months. Since this was during the Civil War, he confined his ministry more closely to his pastorate than he had at Cloverport, and devoted more time to study
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than he had since leaving Bethel College. In September, 1863, he and his wife went back to Beechland for a meeting in which her father, Captain Everhart, a profane swearer and a skeptic, was converted. According to Dr. Spencer's record he held about fourteen special meetings at Beechland from 1858 to 1876. They seem to have made their home at Beechland until her death August 19, 1872.As early as 1866 Dr. Spencer says that he began to learn this history of the churches in which he preached and the biographies of the brethren. In that year he wrote and published a biography of the gifted pulpit orator, Thomas J. Fisher (born April 9, 1812) who had fallen in the strength of his manhood by the hand of an unknown assassin, on the night of January 8, 1866, on the streets of Louisville. Now in 1867, a new feature was added to his labors which became a paramount element of his work for the next twenty years.
Through his interest in Kentucky Baptists he had decided that a true account of their transactions should be collected and published in permanent form . At this time he added to his ministerial labors the task of searching records, gathering old documents, and interviewing aged men and women wherever he went. When he was not engaged in preaching, he would canvass such portions of the state as he had not been able to reach while engaged in his ministry.
On May 11, 1875, three years after the death of his first wife he married Burilla Burton Waller, a member of the noted Waller family which gave to Kentucky Baptists John Lightfoot Waller (1809-1854). After the marriage for some years they lived at Lacona (until 1877), then (1877-1885) at Pleasure Ridge Park, Jefferson County (about five miles south of the limits of Louisville and about two or three miles from the river), then later (1885-1897) they lived at Eminence.
In 1876 the centennial of our national independence was observed. In Kentucky this was also the centennial of Baptist preaching (Thomas Tinsley and William Hickman at Harrodsburg, 1776) and this phase was added to the observance. J. H. Spencer was called on to visit several churches and to deliver addresses in the campaign for Christian education in connection with this observance.
In the Preface to The Baptist Encyclopedia, published by William Cathcart in 1881, the name of J. H. Spencer, D.D., Kentucky, is included among the able brethren who have rendered assistance to the Editor.
As early as 1865 Dr. Spencer was appointed on a committee of the General Association (See minutes, 1886, p. 34, 35) to make plans for writing a history of Baptists in Kentucky. "In 1866, the General Association so amended its constitution as to make it a part of the business of the body: 'To collect and preserve our Denominational History of Kentucky.'" But in 1876, through failure on the part of the committee to procure facts or to obtain a historian, it transferred the whole matter into the hands of Dr. Spencer who personally had already been at the task for ten years.
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For nine years longer Dr. Spencer worked, through continued illness in the last years, and in April, 1885, he completed the work and submitted it to the publishers, at the same time announcing that the book would be sent to pre-paying subscribers at the estimated cost of publishing ($5.00 a set). He states that by the time he needed the money to pay the publishers, he had received every dollar for which he had asked (1,500 subscribers had been requested). It was necessary to order a second edition of the book to supply all the orders which came in.In 1887 (October 20-22), at Walnut Street Baptist Church in Louisville, Kentucky Baptists observed the fiftieth anniversary of the organization of the General Association of Baptists in Kentucky. At this meeting Dr. Spencer read a paper entitled "Fifty Years of Baptist Progress in Kentucky," and it was printed in the Jubilee Volume, published in 1888.
In 1889, perhaps, Dr. Spencer began writing his autobiography which has been preserved in his own handwriting and from which I have drawn largely for this address. He seems to have progressed very slowly with it because of the infirmity of his age. At the time of his death he had brought the record up only to August, 1876. The manuscript is now in the archives of the Kentucky Baptist Historical Society, and recently a typed copy has been made and bound.
Dr. Spencer was known widely as a historical and devotional writer, as well as an effective evangelist. His first publication was a small pamphlet on The Action of Baptism (l863). After he became too afflicted to get away from home, he continued to write for periodicals.
During his active ministry as an evangelist he preached as many as 572 times in one year, and travelled as many as 5,679 miles in a year. There were as many as 147 added to the churches under his ministry in a single year, and it is estimated that 5,000 persons professed faith under his preaching. None of his sermons had been preserved, but he has said that he usually preached about an hour at each service. His descriptive powers are evident from passages of his autobiography, one of which describing the scenes of his boyhood is as follows:
"We lived and labored among the deep solitudes; our recreations were taken amid verdant glens and wild, romantic gorges; in flowery, wooded vales and forests of giant oaks and spreading beech and elms; along the base of rock-crested hills and among foaming cascades and leaping cataracts of crystal waters, and in light canoes on the bosom of a clear bright river. Our companions were the deep-throated wood-lark, the light-grey fawn, the chattering squirrel and the sportive bass. Our worship was in God's great temple of nature; our matins were the songs of the thrush and mocking-bird; our noon refrains, the chorus of the zyphers; our vespers, the hum of insects among the woodbines; and our athems, the roar of waterfalls and the thunder of the heavens."After several years of suffering from rheumatism Dr. Spencer died at his home at Eminence on Tuesday, December 21, 1897. Funeral services were held at Eminence by Dr. W. P. Harvey and Dr. T. T. Eaton, then at Beechland by Dr. W. E. Powers.He was buried beside his first wife in the Bell Cemetery, across the highway from Greenwood School, about a mile and a half west of Beechland Church. His second wife who died November 27, 1915 now rests by his side.
===================== [From Kentucky Baptist Heritage, Leo T. Crismon, editor, Volume XIII, Number 2, November, 1986, pp. 8-13; via Boyce Digital Repository, Adam Winters, Archivist. Scanned and formatted by Jim Duvall.]
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