Mallie Reeves

The generations are long in my mother's family. Mom was born in 1931, when my grandfather, Amos Stackhouse Reeves, was 48 years old. (He and his wife Lottie would have one more child, my aunt Ernestine, three years later.) When Papa Reeves was born in 1883, his father, my great-grandfather Mallie Reeves, was also 48, having been born in February 1835. My cousin Ken Reeves recently sent me this obituary for Mallie Reeves, who died at the age of 77 in February 1912. The obituary was published in the county paper on 29 February 1912.

Mallie Reeves, the well known old soldier of the Cross and one of the oldest citizens of Walnut, who was stricken down with paralysis, died Friday night Feb. 16th. The funeral was conducted on Sunday Feb. 18th by Rev. J. L. Hurdt, followed with short remarks by Dr. A. J. McDevitt, B. E. Guthrie and H. Chandler. He was then laid to rest in the Walnut cemetery on his 77th birthday. This ended the career of one of the most Godly and faithful men that we have ever known. He has done more good throughout Western North Carolina by his praying and singing in revival meetings, perhaps, than any other layman of his day. He deserves the praise of the following scripture. "Well done, thou good and faithful servant, thou has been faithful over a few things, I will make thee ruler over many things; enter thou into the joy of thy Lord."

In the context of the history that I know, he was born the same year as Mark Twain (Samuel Clemens) and about five years after Emily Dickinson. Nathaniel Hawthorne was about 30 years old and writing some of his best short stories. Ralph Waldo Emerson would publish Nature the following year, in 1836. Closer to home when Mallie was born, the Cherokee were in the midst of trying to keep their homelands and avoid the Trail of Tears. Mallie died two months before the sinking of the Titanic and two years before the beginning of World War I.

I've heard that Mallie Reeves could be working in his fields or garden and somebody would come along the road to say he was needed to sing in a revival at such-and-such a church. He would drop everything and go to lead singing at the services. I wonder how that sat with my great-grandmother, whose name was, I think, Julina.

[I might have written about this before, but I wanted to get back to the blog and this was on my mind.]