As Easter approaches, many of us think of sunrise services and the reason we have churches and the opportunity to worship collectively throughout the year. Luther Johnson, whom I mentioned in an earlier article, grew up in the late 1800s in the Fork, the Knox County lands between the French Broad and Holston Rivers, and he left behind memoirs that told many stories about the Fork’s rural churches.

Luther wrote that his first memory of church was of attending a service held in a school in 1886, when he was 6. He told how his father used a pine knot torch to light their way through the woods and across the creek, probably the same creek he was baptized in when he was older. Back then, individuals who felt called toward a relationship with Christ went to the “anxious seat” at the end of the sermon and were met by others who talked with them and prayed with them concerning their spiritual needs.

Salvation and church membership were not taken lightly and were rarely considered seriously before the age of accountability, about the age of 12. After experiencing these things, Luther went through the process of examination to determine whether he really knew what he was doing, but his training and genuine dedication to the study of scripture ensured approval.

His step-mother once observed to their pastor that she thought Luther felt led toward ministry, to which the preacher replied, “Look here, boy, if God calls you to preach, don’t you run from him!” During Luther’s adolescence, the preachers who regularly stopped by the Johnson home would sit by the fireplace in winter or in the yard under the aspen tree in summer and discuss biblical truths and the ills of the world. Sermons of the day included the taboos of fictional literature, and in Luther’s home even Aesop’s fables were forbidden, though Lute pointed out that Jesus taught in similar parables. Tom Sawyer was certainly off limits. Magazines and dime novels were no more welcome in his home than whiskey, though preachers on horseback often kept a flask in one saddlebag and their Bible in another!

Luther described how young and old men would sit on a rail fence at the church and whittle while they waited for Sunday School to be over and the worship service to begin. He said, “Then when the big bell sounded its solemn tones, these men would click the blades of their knives, slowly climb down from the fence and saunter into the church for the preaching.”

When he was 15, Luther made a little book from a pad of paper tied together with string through holes that had been punched with a nail. In it he wrote scripture to aid Christians in bringing others to Christ. One day the book slipped from its place between the cabin logs and fell down into the inaccessible space next to the weatherboarding, never to be retrieved. However, despite his limited resources, Luther eventually was trained at Carson-Newman, was ordained, and spent his life as a minister of the Gospel; his humble foundation not to be forgotten in the Fork.

Jan Loveday Dickens is an educator, historian and author of Forgotten in the Fork, a book about the Knox County lands between the French Broad and Holston Rivers, obtainable by emailing ForgottenInTheFork@gmail.com.