This is a post that raises more questions than it answers. It was an interesting dive down a rabbit hole with lots of random connections, but those connections will probably of interest to only my family.
I never knew my Papa Taylor. He died before I was born. However, I know quite a bit about his career as a minister – his time at Altmont Bible College, the churches he pastored, and his family going back to the first Taylor who came over from Ireland. I did know my Grandmother Taylor. I just remember her as already old when I was a child. She passed away in 1972, but I only remembered her as a stern person. Other than that, there are tons of mysteries.
First was her family. When we moved to Gray Court in 1968 I learned that we had relatives living on our street, but we weren’t allowed to associate with them. I never learned the reason why. It wasn’t until much later that I learned that these were part of my grandmother’s family. My great-grandfather and many relatives were members of Dials Church nearby, and were buried there. To this day I don’t know what caused that family rift, and I’d love to chat with other members of the Leapard family to get their side of things.
I knew that my grandparents met at Altmont Bible College on Paris Mountain in Greenville, and that was where they were married and had their first two children. Both taught at the college before my grandfather became a full-time preacher. I think both of them attended Altmont prior to teaching there, but I have no other record of schools that they attended.
My grandmother’s obituary was equally vague. It just stated that she had been a teacher. I didn’t know if that referred just to Altmont or elsewhere. I’d heard some family lore that she had once taught at Long Branch School, but it was always just a vague reference. I needed more evidence.
My cousin, Ronnie, wrote this on our grandmother’s Find-a-Grave listing:
Mamie K. Leapard Taylor was a stern and proper lady. She was professor of English at Holmes Bible College in Greenville, SC and later was a teacher at Long Branch three-room school house in the Long Branch Community in Laurens County, SC. She married Oscar Eugene Taylor who was Dean of Homiletics at Holmes Bible College. In their early years, they participated in tent revivals throughout the upstate of SC. Mamie and Oscar were the founders of the Laurens Pentecostal Holiness Church by mortgaging their family farm. Mamie and Oscar also founded the Taylor Memorial Pentecostal Church in Rhodesia (Zimbabwe), Southern Africa. They helped organize the Presbyterian Holiness Conference of Upstate SC. The Presbyterian Holiness Conference later joined the Pentecostal Holiness Conference in Franklin Springs, Georgia. Today the conference is known as the International Pentecostal Holiness Church.
In Mamie’s domestic life, she was of hardy, pioneer stock. She grew and preserved their foods and made their clothes on a peddle sewing machine. She was very scholarly and produced several generations of educators in Laurens and Abbeville Counties, SC. She was predeceased by her husband, O.E. Taylor by 17 years and lived with her daughter, Mrs. Mary Johnson, until she was placed in a nursing home. She died in Abbeville County, SC and is buried with her many Taylors and Leopards in Forest Lawn Cemetery in Laurens, Laurens County, SC.
Ronnie’s information is always pretty reliable, but I like seeing documentation. Honestly, my grandmother’s teaching situation was completely out of my mind until a very random discovery. I was doing some research on a completely different topic in the South Carolina Room of the Greenville County Library. I spotted a book by Rev. N. J. Holmes entitled Life Sketches and Sermons. At random I opened the book to page 162 and the first thing I spotted was my grandmother’s name.
This was news to me. I’d never heard that my grandmother had been anywhere other than Greenville, Laurens, or Calhoun Falls in Abbeville County. Yet here she was in 1908 teaching in North Carolina. There were several misspellings in the Holmes book that threw me off. First, he spelled her name “Leopard” instead of “Leapard.” That’s actually a common mistake. The second was that it’s “Culberson” without a “t”. I had to look it up. Culberson is a small community in Cherokee County in Western North Carolina. It’s right at the Georgia-North Carolina border.
This confirmed my grandmother’s status as a teacher, but I still wanted to know more. I had two basic questions I wanted to answer…
- What was the name of the school in Culberson where Mamie Leapard was teaching?
- When did Mamie Leapard teach at Long Branch?
My usually searches for a school in Culberson didn’t turn up any connections. There was a school there, and I found one photograph.
Note the broken window
I still couldn’t find a Mamie Leapard listed as a teacher. The Holmes book stated that she returned to Culberson to teach in 1908.
Rev. A. J. Culberson and Pentecostalism
After some digging I came across A. J. Tomlinson. Tomlinson was a Quaker from Indiana who came to Western North Carolina as a missionary to the mountain people. He arrived in Culberson in 1899 and established a church, school, and orphanage.
Tomlinson didn’t fit in with the mountain people, and didn’t do much to help the situation. From 1901-1902 he published a paper called Samson’s Foxes. The title comes from the book of Judges where Samson tied burning embers to foxes’ tails and sent them into the Philistine’s fields to burn them down. His idea was that he was sent to burn down the sins of the mountain people. It didn’t help that Tomlinson got involved with the Pentecostal movement, which further estranged him from the locals.
About 15 miles northwest of Culberson at Camp Creek there was a revival going on. The Shearer Schoolhouse Revival began in 1896. The locals weren’t happy with this new cult of the Unknown Tongue, and began harassing the revival participants, even to the point of taking pot shots at the worshippers.
In 1902 Tomlinson moved up there, but his school and orphanage continued. At one point the harassment got so bad that Tomlinson left town and wandered a bit. Eventually he moved to Cleveland, Tennessee in 1904 and helped establish the Church of God denomination.
So how does this tie in with Mamie Leapard? I couldn’t find a connection with her and the public schools of the area. Given the Pentecostal connections, it would make sense that my grandmother would be involved with that school. The Holmes reference is for 1908, after Tomlinson left, but the school continued. Right now that’s just pure speculation, but it makes sense. The answer to my first question about the school where she taught remains inconclusive.
As for Camp Creek, it’s now known as the Fields of the Wood Biblical Park and features the world’s largest representation of the 10 Commandments.
Nellie Lane and Long Branch School
Holmes’s memoir mentions several people that traveled to Culberson in 1908. One of those was Miss Nellie Lane. Later that year Lane was appointed as the teacher for Long Branch School, which is where my grandmother was supposed to have taught.
Like Tomlinson, Lane ran into trouble with the locals because of her connections to Pentecostalism. I had already written about her problems in a blog post entitled The Unknown Tongue, but since then I’ve learned more about her connections to Holmes and my grandmother.
After only a couple of months at Long Branch, Lane found herself without a job. Apparently she had been trying to teach her students how to speak in tongues and spent most of the day teaching Bible rather than the approved curriculum. Parents complained, and the entire local school board was removed.
Not only was Lane’s teaching controversial, but apparently she didn’t hold teaching credentials, nor did she even have a college degree. After her dismissal she started her own Pentecostal school in the Long Branch Community, but that didn’t last.
Lidie Sloan replaced Nellie Lane as teacher at Long Branch. I found several subsequent names of teachers, but not my grandmother’s name. I was puzzled.
Finally, in the Dixon Pentecostal Archives I found a publication called The Altamont Witness. In a 1911 issue I found the following:
This was the only evidence I’d found that Mamie Leapard did, in fact, teach at Long Branch. Her departure from Altamont to Long Branch was after Nellie Lane’s controversy, so it probably didn’t make news. I’m still surprised her name hasn’t appeared in in the local news, but I think I know why. She married my grandfather in 1912, and probably left teaching at Long Branch after only one year. From then on she was a pastor’s wife, managing the family farm in Laurens and keeping my father’s large family together while my grandfather was off preaching and establishing Pentecostal churches in the region.
But we’re not quite done with Nellie Lane. After her spot of trouble at Long Branch, she returned to Altamont, later Holmes Bible College. Sara Nell Lane married Paul Beacham, Sr., who became the second president of Holmes Bible College and remained in that position for an astounding 57 years.
One of these days I want to make a trip up to Culberson and to the Camp Creek area. I’m not so much interested in the Bible park as I am with the area’s connection to my family. I still want to learn more about my grandmother’s family, and how my grandmother got involved with Altamont in the first place. Those are questions that might never be answered, but I’ll keep digging.