ISAAC CHAPMAN FOWLER

An Autobiography

“In His own Words”

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Up in the beautiful hills in Tazewell, Virginia, 2500 feet above high tide where amid its bluegrass and ferns, the Clinch fills its crystal urns and starts on its silvery path to the sea, - at nine o’clock on Friday morning, the 2nd of September, 1831 I first became a member of the human family.  My mother was then aged 29 and my father 33.  It was by no means an unimportant period in the life of our planet.  The American Republic was then less than fifty years old.  Washington had been dead but a third of a century and the Great Napoleon but a decade.  Jackson had been on the throne of the Union a year and a half and as a rustic monarch of the new world, was ready to crush the serpent of Nullification.  It was the dawn of the Steam Age.  The first Railway of the World had just been built, between Baltimore and Ellicott City, and the first vessel propelled exclusively by steam had just crossed the Atlantic, from Halifax to England.  The American Continent had nothing better in the way of travel and transportation than the horse and the mule.

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Jackson had ridden on horseback to Washington and while taking the oath as President, had left his horse hitched at the head of Pennsylvania Avenue.  Mankind had yet to wait ten years for the iron moldboard, twenty years for the threshing machine, fourteen years for the telegraph, forty-five years for the telephone, sixteen years for the Chloroform in surgery, and fifty years for the electric light.  There was not a railroad in Virginia.  The old stagecoach with its inspiring bugle was a luxury enjoyed only by exceptional communities.

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The farmer still threshed his wheat with the same flail used by the patriarch on the plains of Judea, and the matrons of Virginia still wove the homespun on the hand looms that had come down from the ages gone.  American manufacturers were practically unknown and goods imported were hauled in the then-familiar four-horse wagon for hundreds of miles from the heads of navigation on our streams, across mountains, to reach the frontier edges of civilization.  A weekly mail was a luxury and new, “fresh” from London, and was forty days old on its arrival.  Postage on a letter was for all distances over 50 miles, 25 cents, to be paid in money, until sixteen years later when the postage stamp was evolved from the brain of a genius.

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The wonderful simplicity of the envelope was to remain unknown for fifteen years and the red wafer was in constant use.

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Chicago was a Hamlet of but twelve families aside from the garrison of Fort Dearborn.  Girarf (?) had just provided the amazing charity which has imbedded his fame in eternal granite, and which still towers above the loftiest works of the century.

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Texas was still sleeping in the embrace of Mexico and California, with its golden viscera having for 17 more years to remain unknown.  Thirty-one years had yet to elapse before Bessemer could give the Steel Rail to Commerce and for fifteen years women had to wait for the sewing machine.

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For the third of a century longer the American slave had to wear his chain and the phonograph and typewriter and the bicycle and the trolley car and the “x-ray” were still invisible in the far-off haze that enveloped the coming close of the century.

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The autumn of life is so short that now, at the age of 66 years, I may not find leisure from business sufficient in which to commit to writing such events of my own life as may be of interest to those family and friends who are to survive me.      

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The history of a single individual, born into the world in an important age and steered by a purpose, to be honest and useful, ought not to be uninteresting to those who have the time to read it. The great majority of persons, be it observed, have not yet been born at all.  Countless numbers may never be, and yet who knows?  If time can continue throughout Eternity, which is not impossible, it might and would be otherwise.  Still a single life, honest and frankly recorded, ought to furnish some light to others who follow.

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I said, or rather intimated, I was born, but the fact is I was not much more than born.  After the period called birth, I was for many months going through the process called incubation.  I was a very delicate specimen of mankind – so delicate that my parents had little hope, if any, that I would reach maturity.  I lacked vital physical force.  I soon became a victim of croup, and for many a night, my mother abandoned all idea of sleep and tried to loan me a portion of her own life, to bridge the deficiencies of mine.  I was pronounced a precocious child and despite my feebleness, walked and pronounced the name of my nurse at the age of nine months.  My maternal Grandfather, Isaac Chapman, of Ripplemead, Giles County, Va., took me on his knee, and after I had spelled for him  “the Richmond Whig and Public Advertiser” gave me his own name.

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My parents were then visiting the old Chapman homestead, at Chapman & Snidow’s Ferry (now Ripple-mead, near Pearisburg, Virginia).        

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My parents continued to reside at Jeffersonville, now Tazewell, till the autumn of 1835, when they removed to “INDIAN” or Mouth of Indian Creek, on New River, Monroe County, Va.  I remember many events of my four years at Tazewell, and distinctly do I remember the trip, on horseback and by wagon, to Indian, distant 60 miles.  Prior to our leaving Tazewell, as a hopeful experiment, my parents sent me across Rich Mountain to spend some days with the Daugherty family in Thompson Valley, some few miles south of Jeffersonville.  It was a family of old maiden ladies, who were first cousins of Hon. John Letcher of Rockbridge County, who in 1859, was elected Governor of Virginia, and subsequently known as the “War-Governor”.  But the elevated atmosphere of Thompson Valley failed to furnish the expected relief and I well remember that at a late hour at night, I found my Father bending over me and asking me if I knew him.  I had another attack of croup.                                                                                                                                       

The Bluegrass and ferns of Tazewell, with its crystal streams over their clean, gravelly beds, possessed a charm which subsequent change of home never erased from my memory and when, after the interval of seventeen years, I returned to Tazewell to live, seemed as fresh and as charming as ever.  There is a fragrance in its verdure, a beauty in its foliage and flowers and a rapture in its landscape which no other country has ever presented to my senses and even to this day they come trooping spontaneously down the avenues of brain and sense wreathed with the immortelles of youth and adding indescribable charm to the sunset of life.  O. Tazewell, I look back beyond the obstacles and sorrows through which for two-thirds of a century I have fought and over which I have fallen and I see about than a halo of beauty so divine as “fancy never could have grown and never can restore.”

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About 1820 my father came to Blountville, Sullivan County, Tennessee, where he commenced under Dr. Elkanah Delaney, the study of medicine.  Thither he came from Parrottsville, Cocke County, Tennessee, where he was born in July 1798, being the oldest child of Dr. Thomas Fowler and his wife, who was Mary Baldridge. 

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He afterward attended Medical lectures of Transylvania University at Lexington Ky.  Returning to Blountville he found himself out of money, having exhausted his means in the pursuit of a professional education, after his course of study at Washington College under the celebrated “Elder Dr. Doak”, Wishing to prospect in South West Virginia he accepted from Dr. Delaney the loan of a horse, saddle and bridle and ten dollars in money.  The ten dollars was never used by him as he met with immediate practice on his way to pay the expenses of his trip as far as Tazewell.   There he met with a reception so hospitable that he determined to remain.

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Such was his immediate success that at an early day he returned to his old friend, Dr. Delaney, the money, horse, saddle, and bridle so kindly loaned him.  After about a year of practice in Tazewell he again attended the Transylvania lectures.  A copy of his carefully and handsomely written notes of these lectures now in my possession, shows this to be in 1824.  In 1820 Col. John B, George, one of his earliest Tazewell friends, was married to Miss Rhoda Pearis, of Pearisburg, Giles County, Va., on which wedding occasion my father was selected as “Best Man” and there he met Miss Priscilla Chapman, who was leading Bride’s Maid, and who became my mother.

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In those olden days, regardless of distance, at the close of the wedding festivities, the select members of the wedding party accompanied the bridle pair to the home of the groom, where a bountiful and joyous reception awaited them.  In this case, the distance was 60 miles, in emphatically a frontier country.  Roads were imperfect and the only practical means of travel was by horse and saddle.  During that two-day travel and the return trip to Giles, Dr. Thomas Fowler and Miss Priscilla Chapman were by the conventionalities of the time were almost exclusive companions.  In the course of time, they married, at the “Old Ferry”, in Giles and again in due time they returned to Tazewell to live.

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The life of a Tazewell physician was of necessity a life in the saddle and so great was my father’s practice, I have heard my mother say that during one entire year, there was not a day during which he was at home for the entire 24 hours.  Typhoid fever was then prevalent in the county.

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On the south side of Main Street, Tazewell is still standing, in good condition, the frame dwelling he erected and which he occupied until 1835, the date of his removal from the county.  In the cavernous soil of Tazewell, it was difficult to secure well water, but a “Crook” named Curtsinger, proposed to dig a well on the Fowler lot, his pay to be increased in case of success.  He was a profane man, whose chief peculiarity was a habit of talking to himself, and he placed implicit faith in the Peachtree divining rod.

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In his exploration of the lot he was overheard saying at one point, where he paused, “Just there is a very small stream of water by G-D”.

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It ended up in his digging at that point and the small stream was found, but it was too small to be satisfactory.  I remember, with the distinctness characteristic of early impressions, accompanying my father uptown as he made his daily visits to superintend officially the erection of Tazewell’s first brick court house which outlived him, lasting for nearly half a century.  I remember asking him in my crude explorations for knowledge, the meaning of such words as “Tazewell”, and tomorrow”, and how unsatisfactory to my hungry mind were his well-meant replies that “this is Tazewell”’ and that tomorrow meant “when we had slept all night”.

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Many times, I wended my confident and important way to the store of Rees T. Bowen and told him I wanted “Marbles” and he always told me to go behind his counter and help myself from the sack in which they were kept, on the lower shelf entirely within my reach.  Little did he then think that nearly forty years in the future I would be in the game of political marbles – would edit and own a leading newspaper in S/W. Va., and be one of the governing forces necessary to his election to a seat in the American Congress.  I never forgot Rees T. Bowen, and those marbles he gave had much to do with his term in the House of Reps.  He was my friend in childhood and I was his friend in his advancing age.  Still, later my heart bled when I read the telegram which told me that he had in the nighttime fell through a hatchway in one of the Tazewell Hotels, receiving injuries that in a few days ended his life.

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But, the glories of Tazewell life soon ended for me.  As a passing cloud across the sun, their wave of light swept past me and I simply remember finding myself aroused from slumber in a bed of sweet-scented hay that one of our moving wagons contained.  All unknown to me we had started from Tazewell to Monroe.  In a short while, we came upon my father and mother, who mounted on horseback, had gone ahead.  At my earnest request, I was transferred from the hay to the horse.  My father having provided for the emergency, a leathern strap by which I was secured against accident.

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Our first day’s journey ended at the residence of Howard Bane, Esq’r, 13 miles east of our late home.  The second day we reached the head of the East River and on the third day the mouth of that stream, now known as the Norfolk and Western R.R., Glen Lynn, and that as the home of the Toney family.  I well remember a game of marbles, which upon our arrival, was being played by boys, both white and black.  The fourth day ended our 60-mile journey.  We landed at the Mouth of Indian Creek, Monroe County, Virginia, now known in the United States Postal Guide as Mouth of Indian, West Virginia.

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We halted our tired teams at the Butcher House, a neatly daubed and whitewashed log building with stone chimneys, situated on the edge of a 50-acre meadow, between Indian Creek and New River at their junction.  Just opposite on the north side of the creek, was the William McDaniel homestead, another log house of structure similar to the one already alluded to.  Near it was an old grist and sawmill, which my father quickly proceeded to demolish for in a few days the McDaniels moved out and we moved in, the former going to the new state of Indiana, where they prospered greatly.

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This locality without any choice of my own became my future home for seventeen years.  During that period there grew up the most intimate acquaintance between myself and its briars, thorns, thistles, snakes, and stony paths.

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But it had deer, foxes, catamounts, ‘coons, possums, hares, squirrels, woodchucks, and fish, and I and my brother, Thomas, more than three years younger than I managed to get from those 17 years at Indian, a deal of the better phases of life.

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Indian was the site of an ancient Indian burial ground.  The level lands, which were the chief attractions of the locality abounded in leaden bullets and the remains of Indian pottery which we found in countless fragments, but never in complete vessels.  Arrowheads and stone hatchets of the most beautiful construction was abundant.  In 1840 there occurred a great flood in the New River Valley, that in some places so washed the soil that these evidences of past contests between whites and Indians were laid bare in wonderful profusion.   Despite all that was new to me there was a great vacuum in my soul.  My memory ran back to Tazewell.  My little town comrades were missing.  No longer could I go to the store of Rees Bowen and ask for marbles. 

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No longer did my father lead me in the activities that were evoked by the construction of the new court building.

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Indian had no comrades for me.  A single family lived only 300 yards distant from us, but my ambitious mother forbade me the privilege of associating with them and there were none other nearer than two miles.  These were no better and day after day, I was lonely that the memory thereof still darkens the picture of Indian.

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Oh! Does the reader of these lines know what it is to the youthful inquirer to the lonely?  Socially I had nearly as well have been on the Antarctic Continent, with my parents, one younger brother, and three negro slaves.   

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But my father seemed pleased with all this that so disappointed me and my mother was simply happy in his satisfaction.  He had been led to believe that the James River and Kanawha Canal scheme of Washington would materialize and that Indian was in its pathway to the Ohio.  Already he and some friends in Giles County had caught the dream of Railroad possibilities and they insisted that the first railway from the Chesapeake must meet the Canal at Indian.  So he proceeded to purchase more land.  James Gore owned a river and mountain farm on the river two miles below Indian and it “joined us”.  So, the Gore farm was bought for $2,000.00, and when added to the McDaniel $6,000.00 purchase we had 2,000 acres of farm, which had at heavy expense to be improved.  It may be that some other youth in the Western Hemisphere has left more perspiration on its soil, and from his lungs and soil exhale more clouds of regret than did I in my fifteen years of exploration, pilgrimage, and toil, through the defiles and jungle and over the torrid declivities of this “Gore Farm”, but I doubt it and this doubt approaches the intensity of a religious conviction.  Yet it was not wholly one-sided.  Its uplands shot out into the New River Valley at one point with a promontory that was covered in the verdure of supreme beauty.  One could stand at “Indian” three miles away and in the afternoon observe the cattle grazing on its amazing tilted surface till there would steal into the soul a picture of the heavenly lands.  I would not be a true historian of the golden age of Indian if I should fail to add that the heavenly parallel failed to materialize in the realistic.  When in April 1852, I took my departure from Indian for the sweet land of Tazewell again and took one last look at this promontory of heaven I was filled with ethereal delight.

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In a year from our first arrival at Indian my mother’s parents, Isaac Chapman and wife – at the Old Ferry – now Ripplemead, in Giles County – died, their deaths occurring in quick succession.

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This wrought another link in the Indian chain, for we fell heir at once to five more negro slaves, and my first recollection is that one winter night my mother told me to go to the kitchen and tell “Uncle Jesse” she wished to see him in “the house”.

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I was surprised to see that instead of five negro slaves we had ten seated about the immense old-fashioned fireplace.  Some six or seven years later my father purchased another negro man, making our number of slaves, eleven.

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The purchase was due largely to the fact that the slaves of our neighbor, Mordecai Roles, two miles above us on Indian Creek, were at enforced sale, to pass into other hands and Patrick, the one alluded to, importuned my father to purchase him.  It may be well to remark here that at the time of emancipation, these slaves had increased in number to 35.  We would not sell these and we could not sell the farm even if we had been so inclined.

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Successive purchases of adjoining lands were made and so the farm became larger and more unmanageable.  Its largest besetment consisted in the fact that its tillable portions were of various areas so disjoined that most of them required separate enclosures entirely.  A division fence between fields was the exception.  Many of them were far beyond the field of vision, which the homestead commanded.  Everywhere was sandstone and shale.  Grasses had to be sown and cultivated.  Fences were poor and stock owned by others and running at large, depredated upon our fields with a degree of enterprise that filled me with a supreme dislike of the whole region.

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As I was a delicate youth it became a conceded and ruling policy of the household that I should “rough it”.  I became quite active and found myself intensely useful in looking after the roguish hogs, cattle, and sheep that complimented our enclosed lands by forsaking other foraging grounds for them.  Every disposition on my part to kick against this free use of my anatomy was at once politely repelled by the flattering declaration that I could attend to it more reliably and intelligently than others.  Then it was too “good for my health”, they declared, that nothing else must be thought of.

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Roads were few and horrible.  I soon became an expert horseback rider and as a general agent and messenger, I was pronounced a success.  Our nearest Post Office was Red Sulphur Springs, distant five miles up the Creek.  All sorts of workers in wool, iron, or leather, all flouring mills, wool carding machines, and stores were distant from 6 to 12 miles.  While few and distant they were needed by our family with a frequency that I grew weary of and for any and all trips I was held in convenient and constant reserve.

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My education in this line was progressing beautifully until it became a settled conviction that the corn and harvest fields of the farm offered to me an opening that ought not to be longer neglected.  I was anxious to be regarded as generally expert and before I knew the danger I had so distinguished myself in this new role that I no longer was permitted to abandon it.

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Oh, how I did welcome the old log field schoolhouse.  It was distant more than two miles over roads and Across creeks that would have been deemed intolerable save as a means of escape from the horrors of the field. 

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I had been taught at my mother’s knee, through Webster’s Speller, and even to read to a limited extent.  About 1837 my Uncle Abijah Fowler, one of the authors of Fowler’s Arithmetic, at a late hour of a wintry night, arrived with a “carry-all” load of his books and halloed at our front gate.  My mother exclaimed, “that is Abijah Fowler’s voice”.  He lived 200 miles distant and had not been seen by her for years, but women’s intuition was in this instance verified and in a few minutes our social circle was ablaze with his fund of anecdote and personal reminiscence.  In a few days, he organized quite a large “Thirty days arithmetic school”.  Both sexes were admitted, most of the pupils being adults.  Three times per day – morning, noon, and evening, the entire school stood up in a row and repeated every table and rule in the book – all speaking at once.

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There was a degree of pleasing excitement and of delightful emulation, a rhythm and unanimity of action that was wonderfully promotive of progress.  The entire lesson soon became so thoroughly learned by all and was delightfully easy and beautiful that the exercise was awaited and looked for with inexpressible anxiety.  Of course, the hours between these recitations were devoted to the study of examples so that at the close of the thirty days term there was scarcely one so dull as not to have mastered the work.  This old system has passed into disuse, but it is by no means certain that it has been or will be improved upon.

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But to the “Old log” or “Old Field Schoolhouse”.  In the autumn of 1840 one George B. Vass, a native of the vicinity, by drawing on the hills and hollows within a radius of three miles, succeeded in organizing a country school of fair size.  Neither age nor size presented any bar to matriculation into varied but limited classes.  Far up in a wooded hollow near the only Mill within ten miles of Indian, the principal patrons of the school met and with axes chopped timber down enough to make a necessary opening which they erected of unhewn logs, simply daubed with mud and covered with clapboards.  In its northern end was the great old fireplace, on its eastern side there was the door, made of boards and framed o wooden hinges, while on the west side, there was an opening for the only window of this crude building.  It was some twelve feet in length, made by sawing out one of the logs, and simply contained a single row of panes of glass.

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In front of it, there was a sloping poplar plank on which the pupils by turns practiced at penmanship.  Except when the weather permitted the open door the only light to the school room was admitted by this writer’s window and the great old widemouthed chimney.  The seats were of split puncheons, with auger holes for the reception of very crude legs.

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Near this building was erected a smaller one for the Teacher’s residence.  The school was to last a year and it opened with the winter.

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At the dinner hour, each male pupil was required to repair to the steep wooded hillsides and procure and chop his proportion of the firewood for the use of the school.

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The Teacher should be mentioned as a fine sample of honesty, for he had lost his little all on a drove of horses and was withal of so heavily in debt that, to protect himself, he filed his petition in Bankruptcy, but all the same undertook to pay these debts, even though it should take his lifetime to do so.  So that during this school term, before breakfast, at noon, and at the evening hour, he grubbed a few acres on the hillside contiguous to the schoolhouse and by his own manual labor produced thereon the means of providing partially for his scanty table in the little log cabin.  The product of his labor as a teacher he scrupulously divided among his creditors.  For years afterward, he taught and grubbed till he paid the last farthing, then went to Indiana and died there.

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Twice a day, at noon and at the close of the day, the entire school “stood up to spell”, the successful one passing to the head of the column.  A small prize was promised by this poor man to the pupil who during the entire year should “stand head” oftenest.  At the end of the year, this prize was awarded to me with the remark that I had stood head more than half the time.

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Mr. Vass used the birch rod liberally and while I excelled in spelling and in other branches. I also succeeded in getting my share o the Birch branch.  After the expiration of this year in the woods Mr. Vass was employed by my father for a year as a teacher of our family school, using therefore the comfortable old Butcher House where we first landed on our removal from Tazewell.

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I at one and the same time respected and hated this man Vass.  Young as I was, respected him for his hard-fisted honesty.  It appeared to me that a man who, in the face of and under the protection of the Bankruptcy law, would live in the woods as he did and grub Dogwood and Sourwood saplings for a scanty remuneration, sleep in a room where he cooked his meals – for he was unmarried – in order to divide through long years among his creditors the little pay he got, and should thus tough it and rough it and patiently endure it all, was entitled to my respect.

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But he singled me out of his large school for the first victim of his birch rod.  I had laughed out in school and he coldly sent one of my fellow pupils to the wooded hillside for a birch rod and when it was brought in, he demanded that  I  should walk in front of him,  and in the view of the entire school, while he should publicly chastise me.  I absolutely refused to go.  He even pleaded with me to do so, but I stubbornly refused.  At last, he led me to believe that if I would obey him by taking the position demanded, he would not apply the rod to me.  I then stepped out and he immediately proceeded to castigate me unmercifully.  He evidently exhibited much feeling against me in doing so.  Meantime the entire school looked on with satisfied surprise.  I was unspeakably humiliated.  I felt he had abused my confidence and deceived me.  I believed then and believed yet, at the end of half a century, that he deliberately and weakly a public example of me for the purpose of the effect it would have over the other pupils of whom he was actually afraid.  My father’s family exceeded in wealth and rank the other patrons of the school.  Mr. Vass thought that if I were made the first victim of his authority it could not subsequently be said of him, by more obscure pupils, that he chastised them because they were socially weaker than I.

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From that hour, I despised him and I even swore on that silent and unseen altar which has been planted in every proud though youthful breast that if I should live to manhood, Vass and I could live peacefully toward each other only by existing in widely separated communities.

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But he had many virtues.   He was a man of delicate physique.  His hair was fine, straight, and fearfully black.  His compaction was like yellow tallow but I never saw among the blue veins, that were ever visible on his forehead and his hands, the slightest tinge or indication of arterial glow.  His countenance was cold and unfeeling.  I went ahead as best I could with spelling, writing, and reading.  It was my good fortune to have my father procure for me a number of Farley’s books.  It was lucky for me to have my very first lessons in reading in the pure and simple style in which they were written.  Farley’s Tales, Farley’s Bible Stories, and Farley’s Asia and Farley’s England, and Farley’s Oceanica, were devoured by me with a curiosity and delight that almost reconciled me to Vass for the time.  I had one more year of him at the old Butcher House and then my cousin, Robert A. Pearis, wishing to study medicine under my father, agreed to teach our private school in the same building, at the same time pursuing his own studies.  At this time my brother Thomas was practically my sole companion, but John Tiffany, Esqr. Who lived ten miles distant, wished to avail himself of the advantages of our school and it was agreed that his son Charles, who was of companionable size for us, should board with us and go to our school.

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This was a great streak of luck for us.  The difference between the social pleasure and enjoyment incident to a year’s contact of two boys, and of three boys may be described as immense.  We had dogs, a gun, a fishing tackle, and a canoe.  The river was on one side of us and Indian Creek on the other.  The streams were stocked with catfish and the eddies abounded in bullfrogs and turtle.

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Our school had new rules inaugurated by my father, giving us study hours from sunrise till eleven o’clock a.m., the frolic till 3 p.m., and study till sunset.  That four hours at midday was largely spent, during the summer season in the river, for we soon learned to swim.  On rare occasions at night, we went with neighboring young men “gigging” or spearing fish, using huge torches made of the rich pine in which portions of the river hills abounded.  On frosty autumn nights, we hunted the raccoon and the opossum being always accompanied by some of the negro men belonging to the family.

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The last I ever saw of my first teacher, Mr. Vass, was in March 1852.  I went on a business trip to Logan Court House, now West Virginia.  I had heard that Anthony Lawson, a greatly successful merchant of the region wished to employ a clerk.  I was very tired of life at Indian and I concluded to ask Mr. Lawson in person.  Oh, what a lonely ride of a hundred miles.  The eternal silences that greeted and grieved De Soto could hardly been exceeded the major portion of that trip.  I spent my second night with a friend and relatives at Oceana, then quite a new town County town of Wyoming County.  To my amazement I there met Mr. Vass, who had gone there to teach a school.  For the first time in all my acquaintances with him, his demeanor toward me was that of pleasant familiarity.  He knew I was a recent student of Emory and Henry College and I teaching a class in surveying he had encountered a problem that neither he nor his class could solve.

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He thought I was his man and he at once applied to me to help him out of the difficulty.  I promised to do so on my return home, and to write him the solution, which I did.                                                                                                                

I think it was the spring of 1842, that my father employed him as a teacher of a family school, for that purpose, using the “Butcher House”.  It was the following year that Robert A. Pearis (The A. standing for Alexander) took charge of this family school, and for two years – 1843 & 1844 – the sovereignty of the Butcher House was transferred from Mr. Vas to him.  He was my first cousin – his mother, Rebecca Chapman, who was the sister of my mother, having died in early married life.  My father became his guardian and so for years, he became a member of our family.  After the usual friction at the usual country schools, he decided to prosecute the study of medicine under my father, so that he became at the same time Pupil and Teacher.  Under him, I was advanced to Green’s English Grammar, Mitchell’s Geography, Comstock’s Natural Philosophy, and Fowler’s – and later, other Arithmetics.  These days were happy ones.

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Owing to my advancement and to my age, I was permitted to leave the school room and pursue my studies where it best suited my inclinations.

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Smugly ensconcing myself among the hay stacks, in the cool and sunny days of Spring and Autumn, or beneath the Apple and Plum trees I Summer, the new and surprising beauties revealed in these books, gave me a supreme delight.  But it should be understood that during the winter seasons, our Teacher visited the Philadelphia Medical College, and our school was there for not continuous.

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At the close of the winter of 1844 and 1845, our teacher found himself as “M.D.”, and was at once interested in seeking for himself a location for the practice of his profession.

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He first visited my father's old friends and relatives in Parrottsville, Cocke County, East Tennessee. There was said to be an excellent village school there. Tennessee though, maybe years younger than Virginia, had already outstripped the older state in that she had a rudimentary free school system, supplemented by taxation. This advantage soon bore fruit that attracted to Parrottsville a very competent teacher from the Olden Plains of Eastern Virginia, Powhatan Bouldin, a citizen so close to the dividing line between the counties of Charlotte and Halifax, that the county of his former home is in doubt. He was a brother of the late Judge Wood Boudin of the Virginia Court of Appeals period at Parrottsville. He was running a large and successful school, distant one mile from the farm residence of my uncle, Josiah Fowler.

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My brother, Thomas B Fowler, accompanied Dr. Pearis on his Tennessee trip and became a boarder in the family of my uncle., with whose sons and daughter he attended as a pupil, the school of Mr. Bouldin In the autumn of 1845, my father concluded to visit his Tennessee friends and to have me accompany him so that I might enter Mr. Boudin's school. In September 1844, he had taken me on a mare visit to the same place. In both cases, the journey was 200 miles and both were made on horseback and in the space of six days.  I was favorably impressed with the appearance of Mr. Bouldin, who was a man of fine physique fully six feet in stature and weighing some 220 pounds. He had a Roman nose and protruding chin that impressed the average pupil so greatly with his strength of purpose and with a sublime sense of his authority in general appearance. He was a silver gray and well knew how to assume an attitude of importance that never failed to make the small pupil shake in his shoes.

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The side of the schoolhouse was handsome and even inspiring. Situated, north of Main Street at the rear of a commodious vacant square and the foot of a beautiful grove of native oaks that shaded the large Methodist campground stood the school building. It was comparatively new of commodious size and of frame structure, weatherboarded without and plastered within.

At each end was a large brick chimney with a large fireplace for each half of the large room, which was the one distinctive feature of its plan. The west end was occupied by the male pupils and the east end for the female pupils. On the south side of the large room, there was an elevated platform on which sat and spat and presided the august and pompous Mr. Bouldin. At each end were closed desks in the wall for the reception of the books, slates, and writing material of the pupils. The immense floor space was well provided with benches of good style and there was an air of light and comfort about the entire interior that was promotive of study. The campground was an acre of ideal landscape, surrounded almost with comfortable and presentable wooden tables in the center of which stood a large and imposing shed constructed of huge oaken timbers and covered with shingles.

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Immediately at one end of it was quite a comfortable and substantial building for the use of the preachers during the annual camp meeting for an epoch only 45 years down the 19th century. This was a good outfit for a country school.

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There were nearly 100 pupils and many of them were grown gentlemen and ladies studying the Latin and Greek languages and similarly advanced others otherwise. And yet Mr. Bouldin used the rod.

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During the long days. He sat on his wooden throne with his five-foot hickory scepter, spat his tobacco juice, and looked sublime. He had two daughters of tender age, the older, extremely ugly, and he beat her often and cruelly in the presence of the school. The younger was beautiful, winning, and bright, and he petted and caressed her but never chastised her. My heart pitied poor Tyler as she was named and my very soul burned with indignation at the brutal treatment of the unfortunate girl. I was just fourteen years of age and I greatly feared this imposing monster. My young wrath swelled within me and I nursed it along. And well, even then I had an idea that “time at length sets all things even”. He professed however to regard me with partiality and he gave me a carte blanche to enjoy together with the older male pupils the freedom of the grounds in pursuit of my studies.

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By some occult and schismatic influence. The young men of the school were divided into the Parrottsville and Big Creek parties. Mr. Bouldin kept a boarding house in connection with his school and the young men from Big Creek boarded with him. It soon became the idea that Mr. Bouldin was a Big Creeker.

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I was necessarily one of the Parrottsville party which contained some very nice young men, though none of them were physically a match for the stalwarts from Big Creek.

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As the months wore away the feeling between the two parties became so intensified and persons outside the school participated in it. A bad pugilistic encounter occurred between one of the grown pupils and a merchant of the town, and as the two antagonists were of opposite school alignment, it made matters worse. As the town party was not equal in muscle to the Big Creek party, there was no desire on their part to participate in a collision and there was a subdued peace till the following September.

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Meantime, I pursued my studies in English going through Smith's and then Boyens, English Grammar, Mitchell Geography, Fowler's Arithmetic, Pike's Arithmetic, Davies Arithmetic and Emerson's arithmetic, and Davies geometry. In the outdoor practice of my studies. I became even to some of the grown young men a teacher, especially in mathematics, a number of whom declared they preferred my instructions to those of Mr. Bouldin.   

But the summer vacation put in its appearance in due time and the feuds and ambitions that were fed by daily associations had time to subside as the social life of a school dissolved for the dog days. In the meantime, let us go back for a while to the:

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HOME LIFE ON CLEAR CREEK

A beautiful little stream called Clear Creek threaded its silver pathway through the environments of Parrottsville and ran westerly through a semi-wooded mile of distance to the home of my uncle Josiah Fowler, with whom I and my brother were boarding, who had spent a portion of his young manhood in getting up in partnership with his older brother, Abijah Fowler, Fowler's arithmetic. After its general introduction throughout East Tennessee, he married and settled at the point above indicated on Clear Creek and became a model and successful farmer. During the winter we spent there, it was a continuous round of enjoyable home life varied by the excitements connected with school days at Parrottsville.

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In that winter of 1845-6, my uncle's family was visited by John Fowler of Laurens District, South Carolina, who brought with him his two sons. Wade Fowler, Wiley Y. Fowler and daughter Millie, all of them being grown. John Fowler was a second or third cousin of Josiah Fowler. After a delightful visit of several weeks, he and Wade Fowler returned to South Carolina, leaving Wiley and Millie, who entered Mr. Bouldin's school and remained as pupils of it till its inglorious ending to be chronicled further on in this narrative.    

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These additions to our home circle enabled us to pass the long winter nights in study that were enlivened and heightened by the most delightful social intercourse in which vocal music and anecdotes abounded. John Fowler was a man of the same age as my uncle and the two were fully as mirthful as the younger pupils. Companionship with them was delightful.   During the following summer, Edward Baldridge, who was also a cousin of some degree of Josiah Fowler, the latter's mother being Mary Baldridge, dropped down into the Clear Creek Ranch and there remained for several months. I think he too came from South Carolina. He was a man of fine intellectual facilities but was, as I remember, a bachelor of some fifty years and seemed to have no special aim in life. I regret that neither from him nor from my father's mother did I think to get any history of the Baldridge side of my family's house. During the year 1846, the inspiring and exciting news of the battles of Taylor and Scott with Santa Ana and Mexico reached us by the tedious process of the stagecoach, steamboat, and horse mail.

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But it was nonetheless interesting for the fact that the telegraph was scarcely evolved from the wonderful brain of Morse and certainly in a very limited use.

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SCHOOL AGAIN

At last in the beautiful month of September, when skies looked fairest and earth looked richest, a small portentous explosion occurred in Parrottsville. The school of the august Mr. Bouldin was seemingly on Heavenly seas, and while it was drifting in sweet serenity as still as Longfellow's “Wreck of the Hesperus”, she drifted where the salt sea waves looked soft as carded wool.

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It was perhaps the last Monday morning of September that on my arrival at this schoolhouse, I was told of an occurrence of the day previous that in the parlor of one of the Parrottsville families, in which reflections were made on one of my friends who was a pupil of mature years. I promptly informed him of it. The little spark became a blaze and in less than an hour, the bully of the Big Creek party attacked my aforesaid friend near the schoolhouse door.

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As the fight progressed, the entire school rushed out to witness it. Prominent in this crowd was the important Mr. Bouldin, who stood within six feet of the contestants with a composure that was devilish, saw my friend overpowered by his coarse antagonist and his head beaten against the schoolhouse wall until he bled and was finally forced to call for relief. Another big creek bully then stepped forward at the sight of Mr. Bouldin and said there were some more present who needed chastisement and if such would then step forward, they would be accommodated. Mr. Bouldin waited to see that no one responded to the challenge and without having uttered a word during the whole affair, he announced that school would then be resumed.

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At night. I told my uncle of the affair and asked him if he thought that a man who would thus demean himself was a proper one to teach a school.  I had stated the case allegorically, suppressing any reference to names or locality. He instantly asked me if any such case had occurred within my knowledge. I saw I had “struck oil” and frankly told him the whole truth. I saw him bite his lips and I knew Mr. Bouldin’s school was ended. Our family was represented in it by eleven cash-paying pupils and Josiah Fowler was no pawn in any Parrotsville game. The next morning a servant and two horse wagons were at my disposal for a “very determined man was this quiet uncle of mine”. At his soft command. I went to Mr. Bouldin’s schoolhouse as the sun was shifting beautifully and the very quietness of the whole scene bespoke a calm, suggestive of peace and love. The vast school minus our eleven were in their seats and Mr. Bouldin was on his throne and was quietly masticating his tobacco and spitting its Virginia juices on the floor. There was not a sound to break this unnatural silence as I timidly walked into the schoolroom. It was my last pilgrimage to the Bouldin throne. Poor Tyler and my bloody but intellectual and plucky friend were now to be avenged.

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In the non-poetic language which best fitted the occasion. I informed my late teacher that my uncle had directed me to ask for the privilege of removing from the building all the books, desks, and furniture that belonged to our cabalistic eleven and that a wagon was waiting without for the purpose of removing them.

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The lordly and fearful Mr. Bodine sprang from his throne as if fired from a catapult with his awe-inspiring anatomy he towered.

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To be brief about it. He first exploded and then declared I had just saved myself from expulsion -- that I was the cause of the whole affair that he had intended on my arrival to expel me from the school and to use a homely phrase, he proceeded in the presence of some seventy-five pupils to preach my funeral.  In sundry and diverse ways. he gave vent to a towering and guilty rage that bordered on insanity. For a moment I was terrorized, but the sun was shining so sweetly overhead that I felt somewhat reassured. The audience was fine and we both had the most quiet and flattering attention. No expulsions were now needed in that school. That bright day was its last. Next morning, of the fifty Parrotsville adherents, not one was at school, and never again did even one of them muster under Mr. Bouldin's banner. Mr. Bouldin became quickly and fearfully drunk and proceeded to terrorize the village. As he walked, the Parrotsville earth was like an enraged mastodon.

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In a few days and during his intoxication, the Methodist Camp Meeting was so close at hand that tent holders began their preparations for that interesting annual event. Mr. Bouldin walked into the sacred grounds and proceeded to insult Major Smith, the father of three of the pupils who had followed us out of the school. Within five minutes he received a thrashing that was simply indicative of retributive justice. Major Smith stamped him till he feared to progress further with the delightful pastime.

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A week thence, I and my brother, accompanied by our uncle, were welcomed at Old Indian by the loving ones there who were first amazed and then delighted. We had done just right was the verdict of my father and mother. My Uncle Josiah made an exception of me and kept up for years thereafter a correspondence with me. During many of the following months he wrote me that every time he met the dethroned monarch of the Parrottsville Academy, the latter had declared to him that “Chap” Fowler had broken up his school and I always asked my uncle to reply to him that I was proud to have the credit of it.

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Sixteen of the sweet years of my life had passed. I had bid adieu to Indian and had gone back to the sweet-scented summers of Tazewell. There I had married and had spent eight years of happiness and then removed to Emory, where I had been educated, after losing sight of Parrottsville. The wonderful piece that distinguished the Union had terminated and the bloody and fearful war of secession had come. East Tennessee had divided over the question of the Union. Her people had become enraged at each other and there was no longer peace within her borders. Many of those who adhered to the southern flag refuged to Virginia. It was in January 1863, almost midway through the war, that I was for a while assisting Mr. W. A. Stuart at Saltville, leaving my family at Emory where I had an apology for a store for no one could procure anything of value owing to the blockade. I had left my store clerk in charge of the store and post office during my absence in the above-named capacity.

A tall, gray-headed, and gray-bearded man came plodding on foot from the west through the snow to the door of my store and asked permission of my salesman to warm himself at the fire.  While doing so, he inquired the name of the proprietor and expressed a lively curiosity as to whether I had once been a pupil of his at Parrottsville, Tennessee. On being told that often I had been heard to speak of going to school at that locality, he at once remarked he must be going on and went slowly down the snowy track of the railroad leading to eastern Virginia. On my return from Saltville I was told of the matter and looking back through the intervening years I thought I could see that the storms and disappointments of domestic life had told on  Mrs. Bouldin. She had died and the children had matured and sought the thousand by-paths that lead from the parental roof out into the wide world so that my old teacher had fled from the hostile guns and fratricidal strife between the divided people of East Tennessee and vainly sought the last Paradise at East Virginia. That broken-in Fortune had bent with age and pining for the still-sweet visions of younger and better days.

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He had undertaken the painful pilgrimage on foot to the land of his fathers; that naturally he had taken the line of railway that leads from the beautiful French Broad to the winding and slow-moving Appomattox.

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My heart filled at once with sorrow over the picture I had conjured. And I greatly regretted that my absence had prevented me from giving him a welcome to my door and the pitiful aid that the war had left in my power. Of course, he has long since passed the way of man, men and I fain would hope, has passed up the golden stairs.

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BACK ON THE INDIAN FARM

This rupture of the Parrotsville school resulted in my renewal of the experience of the old Indian farm and for more than a year I had the renewed delights afforded by its bruises and its briars, its snows and its torrid heat, its fishes and its fruits. For Indian was a land of the apple and the peach and the grape. New River was a stream of alternate shoals and eddies and its waters were of delightful temperature at summer time. I became an expert swimmer being at the curious and inquiring age of sixteen. I became quite a reader. My father had a fair library which I took every opportunity to utilize and I eagerly devoured every newspaper and literary monthly I could procure up to this period of my life. My experience had alternated between the farm life and the seclusion of Indian and the delights of school life away from home. I could but sympathize with the kindly-hearted Negro slaves with whom I had at times toiled in the field but who had no intermissions of relief from its terrible monotony.

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I found myself unconsciously but steadily drifting into sympathy with the anti-slavery cause. I took in what appeared to me to be the enormity of human slavery, and I often conversed with my parents on the then-utopian idea of the freedom of the Negro slave.

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Our own slaves were increasing in numbers and in the necessary life with them on the farm, I found them always kindly disposed, loyal to me, and even companionable in many ways. I looked eagerly forward to the day when I would be emancipated from the horrors of lonely country life and the hardships and exposure of the farm.

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But as I listened to the monotonous songs of these slaves and witnessed their exclusion from the satisfaction of books and from the hope that education inspires, I could see no bow of promise in their sky, and my heart pitied them. Some of them besought me to teach them to spell and read so that they could read the Bible and the church hymns. And I was informed that the code of Virginia by Act of Assembly session of 1830 and 1831, Page 108 and of 1847 1848, page 120 enacted that “If a white person assembled with Negroes for the purpose of instructing them to read and write, he shall be confined in jail, not exceeding six months and fined, not exceeding one hundred dollars. All the same, I proceeded to do so as the opportunity offered.

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These slaves owned by us were free from one source of awful dread to the slave race as a rule. They knew we would not willingly put them on the auction block. Still, the idea that as the children of my father matured, they would naturally revolt against a separation of them. To some extent, this was ever present and they looked forward to it with mingled solicitude and curious interest.

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At last, came the winter of 1847-8, and it was then agreed I should be sent to Emory and Henry College, the only institution of note within our reach. It was distant 100 miles across streams and mountains and was reached only by wagon roads that were quite imperfect. There was no stage route between and it was an absolute necessity that its students should take with them their own outfits.

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Taking advantage of some wagons that were going to Saltville which is distant ten miles from the college. I, in the cold and dreary days of early January, landed at Emory and Henry and introduced myself to President Charles Collins, was assigned to room 36 third story West Wing of the College building with Oscar Wylie of Botetourt County, now, Dr. Wylie of Salem and my roommate. The almost intolerable loneliness of my first college days surpassed, if possible, that of Indian, but soon gave way to delightful companionships that were speedily formed and I found my new life filled and expanded with intense satisfaction, often resulting from enlarged literacy and social advantages. The thorns and exclusion of Indian formed in my mind imperishable background on which the real life I had commenced and the luminous hopes of the future took shape in pictures that made me supremely happy. But trooping across this bright picture came gloomy convictions that the slaves had left in fields of Indian could look forward to no future brighter than their then present.

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During the two entire years of 1848-9 that I remained at Emory for such the college post office was called. I devoted myself to the completion of the English course of study. I soon joined the Hermesian Society and having access to its library, I gratified my thirst for reading by resort to those offers most celebrated for the purity of their style, such as Prescott, Irving, Addison, Macaulay, Milton, and Walter Scott.

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During 1848. Reverend Frederick A. Ross, D.D., a Presbyterian Divine of East Tennessee, invaded the college vicinity on a purely doctrinal mission. He was a declared Calvinist and one of the ablest Logicians in the country. The college and all its staff were Methodists. The college being the child of the Holston Methodist Conference. The notorious “Parson” Brownlow of the Knoxville Whig was a violent advocate of Armenianism. He and Ross had collided in the literary debates that distinguished that period. This oratory and doctrinal invasion of Dr. Ross was resented by the Methodist and very heated and interesting discussions in the vicinity of the college resulted during one of the large occasions of this kind being a very large assemblage of old Glade Spring Church.

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To hear him, I made a pencil portrait of him that was pronounced lifelike and I soon found myself famous among the students of the College and this spread into the faculty of the college. Then consisting of President Charles Collins and Professor E. E. Wiley and Edmund Longley, all Northern men. I was quickly overwhelmed with applications for many of these to make like portraits of them. This pressure soon amounted to quite an obstacle to the proper pursuit of my studies. At first, the idea of receiving any remuneration for such services was repugnant to me and I stoutly refused every offer of money that was made to me. At last, however, I was compelled to charge for these portraits in order to lessen the number of applications that I found my lean purse replenished so that I was no longer scarce of pocket money. It was told and retold to me.

I was destined to become an artist and a distinguished career as such was predicted. If all this happened in this age of railways and cheap fares to Europe, it might have been. But at the close of 1849, fate took me back to Indian and that was sufficient to snuff out any flame of artistic ambition. I had no one to look to in a line that seemed fated to the seclusion of some European attic for years to come.  I was again bitten by the water snakes of Indian and bled by their thorns and briars and various experiences, including quite an experience in teaching again at a family school. I formed a plan of getting a position as a salesman in some mercantile establishment with a view to becoming a merchant. For this seemed to me the speediest way to a little money. I found I could do nothing in life till I had first accumulated some money. This was no sort of desire on my part. What is money? It is stored up power. It is accumulated labor. It is hard to be a force in the world till one has a cash storage battery of financial power.

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