Leonora Whitaker Wood—The Real "Christy" of Appalachia
Leonora Whitaker Wood
The Real "Christy" of Appalachia
Leonora Haseltine Whitaker was born on a farm on 26 October 1890 near Dillingham, in Buncombe County, North Carolina, the eldest of eight children. Her parents, George Mannon Whitaker and Catherine Kitty Holcombe, were prosperous and self-sufficient.
Leonora and her sisters milked cows, gathered eggs, canned vegetables and fruits for the winter, cooked, baked, did the weekly laundry and seasonal chores, and sewed the family's clothes, under their mother's capable supervision. Her brothers tilled, planted, and harvested the fields with her father, tended livestock, and kept the barns, tools, and machinery in working order. Leonora's family worshiped at Dillingham Presbyterian Church, a mountain mission congregation founded by the Asheville Presbytery during her girlhood, and she attended a country school through grade eight in the same community. All of the family were taught to love God and study hard.
Since Buncombe County operated no public high schools until 1907, Leonora attended the nearby Weaverville College (est. 1873), a private academy owned by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. When she graduated, Leonora taught in the country school for three semesters. Then something happened that changed her life. In the summer of 1909, Leonora attended a Presbyterian camp meeting at the newly-opened Montreat Conference Center in North Carolina. From the American Inland Mission team, working in the Appalachian mountains near her home, Leonora learned of the need for a school teacher to continue the education of children of the scattered community called Chapel Hollow, near Del Rio, in the rugged mountains of southeast Tennessee.
She heard that establishing settlement schools in Appalachia in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s was a hard-fought battle. Finding qualified teachers willing to travel to these isolated places, to forego all elements of comfort for little pay, and become a permanent part of the community, was a difficult and almost impossible undertaking. The opening of such a school was a life-altering event in the backwoods of the Great Smokey Mountains. While there were children in attendance, of course, many adults also made their way to the church-schoolhouse to investigate the teacher and determine if he or she were able to live among them. If the community accepted the teacher, the adults would come to learn as well.
Leonora sensed a call from God to respond, shared her decision with her family, resigned her current position, and packed her bags to leave home. She boarded the train to Del Rio a couple of days after Christmas of 1909, and arrived at the tiny depot in a bitter snowstorm. No one met her at the station, so she stayed the night with Joseph and Mildred Burnett at their boarding house nearby. The next day, she trudged seven miles in the deep snow to the Ebenezer Mission in Chapel Hollow, where the school and church met in a small, one-room building. She quickly learned that her fine clothing and heels were not needed there. Life was more simple and practical. Word spread quickly that a new teacher had come, and the families came to meet her. She became friends with one or two women and then, over time, with the entire community. She slowly grew to love the people, and they her, although her heart was often broken over their condition.
She became starkly aware that their way of life was bleak, caused by generational poverty, a lack of educational opportunity, acute and severe illnesses with no proper medical care, and malnutrition. To make matters worse, centuries of feuding, moon-shining, and other evils had characterized their heritage. Adults and older teens often either left home early or became resigned to hopelessness.
Leonora also met the new pastor of the Ebenezer mission, John Ambrose Wood, who had arrived just three months earlier than she. Leonora and John shared a similar calling and soon fell in love. They married on 3 May 1910, four months after meeting. They started a Sunshine Band for little ones, with weekly gatherings, including singing, Bible lessons, and sentence prayers. They taught children and adults to read, trained the families in discipleship, challenged them to apply biblical truth to their daily lives, witnessed and combated evil and abuses, and prayed for God to change the situation. He answered by changing their own hearts. They began to see "the poor" in new and much more complex ways.
Their parish families were descendants of Scots-Irish settlers who had come to the mountains in the 17th century, bringing with them a respect for biblical authority, a longing for education, courage to live under the most brutal and harsh conditions, and a proud, self-sufficient dignity in their mountain ways and useful wisdom. Leonora once wrote, “I sometimes shudder when I look into the faces of my students, and note their intelligence, and realize the responsibility that rests upon me as their teacher.” The couple also found deep and inherent goodness, an artistic appreciation of beauty, the love of music and poetry and the singing of ballads. They were amazed at the profound knowledge gleaned from ancestral memories, the medicinal and home-spun remedies for common ailments, language expressions from European origins, and the skills, expertise, and command of the mountain's resources to sustain daily existence.
They learned that these "rural poor" did not have the material possessions of their counterparts from the city, but they were rich in many ways townsfolk knew nothing about. Leonora and John had to re-think their former assumptions about how they viewed, and ministered to, the poor. They had received much more from their people than they had given. And finding solutions to help them was more multifaceted than they had imagined.
Leonora and John eventually moved from Chapel Hollow when Leonora's health required a dryer climate. They spent the rest of their lives pastoring Presbyterian churches in Tennessee and West Virginia. They had two daughters and one son. While a junior at Agnes Scott College, their daughter, Catherine, met and married Peter Marshall in 1936. They moved to Washington D.C., where Peter served as pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church and Chaplain of the US Senate. Their nine-year-old son, Peter John Marshall, later also became a minister and author. Catherine Marshall wrote a biography of her late husband, A Man Called Peter, published in 1951, and a novel based on her mother's life in Ebenezer Mission, called Christy. It was also made into a movie and a television series. In a Christianity Today survey, Christy ranks 27th out of the top 50 books, post-World War II, that have most shaped evangelicals' minds.
This month we celebrate those who leave behind the comfortable and embrace the unknown, in order to bring the Gospel to all people, including the poor, who are always with us. "Blessed are the feet of those who preach the Gospel of peace" (Isaiah 52:7, Romans 10:15).
-Karen O'Dell Bullock
Leonora and her sisters milked cows, gathered eggs, canned vegetables and fruits for the winter, cooked, baked, did the weekly laundry and seasonal chores, and sewed the family's clothes, under their mother's capable supervision. Her brothers tilled, planted, and harvested the fields with her father, tended livestock, and kept the barns, tools, and machinery in working order. Leonora's family worshiped at Dillingham Presbyterian Church, a mountain mission congregation founded by the Asheville Presbytery during her girlhood, and she attended a country school through grade eight in the same community. All of the family were taught to love God and study hard.
Since Buncombe County operated no public high schools until 1907, Leonora attended the nearby Weaverville College (est. 1873), a private academy owned by the Methodist Episcopal Church, South. When she graduated, Leonora taught in the country school for three semesters. Then something happened that changed her life. In the summer of 1909, Leonora attended a Presbyterian camp meeting at the newly-opened Montreat Conference Center in North Carolina. From the American Inland Mission team, working in the Appalachian mountains near her home, Leonora learned of the need for a school teacher to continue the education of children of the scattered community called Chapel Hollow, near Del Rio, in the rugged mountains of southeast Tennessee.
She heard that establishing settlement schools in Appalachia in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s was a hard-fought battle. Finding qualified teachers willing to travel to these isolated places, to forego all elements of comfort for little pay, and become a permanent part of the community, was a difficult and almost impossible undertaking. The opening of such a school was a life-altering event in the backwoods of the Great Smokey Mountains. While there were children in attendance, of course, many adults also made their way to the church-schoolhouse to investigate the teacher and determine if he or she were able to live among them. If the community accepted the teacher, the adults would come to learn as well.
Leonora sensed a call from God to respond, shared her decision with her family, resigned her current position, and packed her bags to leave home. She boarded the train to Del Rio a couple of days after Christmas of 1909, and arrived at the tiny depot in a bitter snowstorm. No one met her at the station, so she stayed the night with Joseph and Mildred Burnett at their boarding house nearby. The next day, she trudged seven miles in the deep snow to the Ebenezer Mission in Chapel Hollow, where the school and church met in a small, one-room building. She quickly learned that her fine clothing and heels were not needed there. Life was more simple and practical. Word spread quickly that a new teacher had come, and the families came to meet her. She became friends with one or two women and then, over time, with the entire community. She slowly grew to love the people, and they her, although her heart was often broken over their condition.
She became starkly aware that their way of life was bleak, caused by generational poverty, a lack of educational opportunity, acute and severe illnesses with no proper medical care, and malnutrition. To make matters worse, centuries of feuding, moon-shining, and other evils had characterized their heritage. Adults and older teens often either left home early or became resigned to hopelessness.
Leonora also met the new pastor of the Ebenezer mission, John Ambrose Wood, who had arrived just three months earlier than she. Leonora and John shared a similar calling and soon fell in love. They married on 3 May 1910, four months after meeting. They started a Sunshine Band for little ones, with weekly gatherings, including singing, Bible lessons, and sentence prayers. They taught children and adults to read, trained the families in discipleship, challenged them to apply biblical truth to their daily lives, witnessed and combated evil and abuses, and prayed for God to change the situation. He answered by changing their own hearts. They began to see "the poor" in new and much more complex ways.
Their parish families were descendants of Scots-Irish settlers who had come to the mountains in the 17th century, bringing with them a respect for biblical authority, a longing for education, courage to live under the most brutal and harsh conditions, and a proud, self-sufficient dignity in their mountain ways and useful wisdom. Leonora once wrote, “I sometimes shudder when I look into the faces of my students, and note their intelligence, and realize the responsibility that rests upon me as their teacher.” The couple also found deep and inherent goodness, an artistic appreciation of beauty, the love of music and poetry and the singing of ballads. They were amazed at the profound knowledge gleaned from ancestral memories, the medicinal and home-spun remedies for common ailments, language expressions from European origins, and the skills, expertise, and command of the mountain's resources to sustain daily existence.
They learned that these "rural poor" did not have the material possessions of their counterparts from the city, but they were rich in many ways townsfolk knew nothing about. Leonora and John had to re-think their former assumptions about how they viewed, and ministered to, the poor. They had received much more from their people than they had given. And finding solutions to help them was more multifaceted than they had imagined.
Leonora and John eventually moved from Chapel Hollow when Leonora's health required a dryer climate. They spent the rest of their lives pastoring Presbyterian churches in Tennessee and West Virginia. They had two daughters and one son. While a junior at Agnes Scott College, their daughter, Catherine, met and married Peter Marshall in 1936. They moved to Washington D.C., where Peter served as pastor of the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church and Chaplain of the US Senate. Their nine-year-old son, Peter John Marshall, later also became a minister and author. Catherine Marshall wrote a biography of her late husband, A Man Called Peter, published in 1951, and a novel based on her mother's life in Ebenezer Mission, called Christy. It was also made into a movie and a television series. In a Christianity Today survey, Christy ranks 27th out of the top 50 books, post-World War II, that have most shaped evangelicals' minds.
This month we celebrate those who leave behind the comfortable and embrace the unknown, in order to bring the Gospel to all people, including the poor, who are always with us. "Blessed are the feet of those who preach the Gospel of peace" (Isaiah 52:7, Romans 10:15).
-Karen O'Dell Bullock
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