Beneath
the pulpit of an East Texas country church, far from the saddle-sloped mountains
of his beloved Kentucky, Littleton Fowler lies at rest.
He has been dead
since 1846, the martyr of an exacting era, but his spirit and works still course
through the bloodstream of Texas Methodism.
Fowler was a circuit rider,
missionary, marksman, chaplain of the Texas Senate and a brilliant pulpiteer who
rode and walked thousands of miles between the Sabine
River and San Antonio to found
many of Texas’ Methodist churches.
Licensed to preach in 1826, he volunteered
for service in the Republic of Texas in 1836, but illness delayed his departure.
He arrived in time to help build the first church building at McMahan’s
Chapel near San Augustine.
Founded in 1833, and acknowledged as the birthplace of Texas Methodism, the church
became Fowler’s headquarters as he carried the faith throughout Texas,
including what he called “pagan Houston.”
In 1833 at San
Augustine, he stood with a Republic military hero, Thomas J. Rusk, to dedicate
the town’s First Methodist Church. He wrote in his diary that the church was the
first Protestant church ever laid west of the Sabine,
where Texans were lately under a government of religious and civil depotism.”
He said since the birth of time, no cornerstone of a Protestant church
had been laid between this and the Isthmus of Panama, the Pacific Ocean, and the
southern extremities of South America.
Fowler enthusiastically labeled
the event as “the beginning of Protestantism west of the Sabine...and
she will march on westward with blessings for our race.” The same year, however,
Fowler’s evangelistic zeal dimmed when, as the chaplain for the Texas Senate,
he accompanied a band of politicians on a steamboat trip from Houston
to Galveston.
In his journal, he described the trip:
“I saw men in high life...if
what I saw and heard were a fair representation, my God, keep me from such scenes
in the future....”
On the ship’s return on Sunday afternoon, he said “about
half of the men on board got wildly drunk and stripped themselves to their linen
and pantaloons...their bacchanalian revels and bloodcurdling profanity made the
pleasure boat a living hell. I was relapsed from the trip and brought nearly to
the valley of death.”
In 1846, Fowler became seriously ill while preaching
at Douglas in Nacogdoches County.
He was carried to his home at McMahan’s
Chapel and on January 29, he died from an acute infection.
But he
retained his fervency to the very end. As
his wife leaned over to his deathbed, he asked, “Who’s there?”
“Your unhappy
wife,” she said.
“Ah,” he sighed just before he died, “I thought it was
an angel.”
Bob Bowman's East Texas July 11,
2010 Column
A weekly column syndicated in 109 East Texas newspapers
Copyright
Bob Bowman
More:
People | Texas
Churches |
