Part 1

ELIJAH KELLOGG

THE MAN AND HIS WORK

CHAPTERS FROM HIS LIFE AND SELECTIONS FROM HIS WRITINGS

EDITED BY

WILMOT BROOKINGS MITCHELL

PROFESSOR OF RHETORIC AND ORATORY BOWDOIN COLLEGE

BOSTON LEE AND SHEPARD 1903

COPYRIGHT, 1903, BY LEE AND SHEPARD.

Published, November, 1903.

_All Rights Reserved._

ELIJAH KELLOGG.

Norwood Press J. S. Cushing & Co.--Berwick & Smith Co. Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

To

FRANK GILMAN KELLOGG

AND

MARY CATHERINE BATCHELDER

THIS SCANTY RECORD

OF THE

LIFE AND WORK OF THEIR BELOVED FATHER

IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED

PREFACE

This book makes no pretence of expounding the doctrines of the theologian or analyzing the methods of the artist. It is simply a remembrancer of a quaint and winning man for his intimate friends and parishioners; for the boys who have delighted in his stories; for the sailors whose lives he saved from shipwreck; for the college students who learned from him a wisdom not to be found in books; for all, in fact, to whom the memory of his unique personality is dear. With the story of his life, with anecdote and reminiscence, with selections from his speeches, sermons, letters, and journal, it aims to recall Elijah Kellogg as he really was: the boy, tingling with life and full of fun to his finger tips; the college student, genial, prankish, and zealous; the farmer-preacher, devout and resourceful, making pen and book, scythe and hoe, seine and boat, all his ready servants to do God’s work; the author, finding his way straight to the heart of the growing boy; the aged man, fond as ever of the soil and the sea, and after all the rubs and chances of a long life, still young in spirit, strong in faith, and free from bitterness and guile.

Acknowledgment is here due to Mr. Kellogg’s son and daughter, Mr. Frank G. Kellogg and Mrs. Mary C. Batchelder, and to many of his intimate acquaintances in Harpswell and Brunswick for information relating to his early Harpswell life. Special acknowledgment is also due to President William DeWitt Hyde for valuable advice concerning the preparation of this book.

W. B. M.

BRUNSWICK, MAINE, November 23, 1903.

CONTENTS

BIOGRAPHICAL CHAPTERS

PAGE

THE BOY 1

Rev. George Lewis, D.D., Pastor of Congregational Church, South Berwick, Maine.

COLLEGE AND SEMINARY 27

Henry Leland Chapman, D.D., Professor of English Literature, Bowdoin College.

EARLY HARPSWELL DAYS 50

Wilmot Brookings Mitchell, Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory, Bowdoin College.

THE SEAMAN’S FRIEND 74

George Kimball, Dorchester, Mass.

AS SEEN THROUGH A BOY’S EYES 94

Judge William Oliver Clough, Nashua, N.H.

KELLOGG THE AUTHOR 115

Wilmot Brookings Mitchell.

LAST DAYS IN HARPSWELL 141

As Seen in Letters and Journal.

REMINISCENCES 169

General Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, LL.D., Ex-Governor of Maine and Ex-President of Bowdoin College.

A TRIBUTE 190

Rev. Abiel Holmes Wright, A.M., formerly Pastor of St. Lawrence Street Church, Portland, Maine.

SELECTIONS FROM WRITINGS

DECLAMATIONS:

Spartacus to the Gladiators 205

Regulus to the Carthaginians 211

Hannibal at the Altar 217

Pericles to the People 225

Icilius 229

Decius 236

Leonidas 241

The Centurion 248

Virginius to the Roman Army 254

General Gage and the Boston Boys 259

The Wrecked Pirate 265

SPEECHES:

“An Ounce of Prevention” 271

Delivered in Boston in 1861.

Religious Worship Early in the Century 276

Delivered at Portland, Maine, Centennial Celebration, July 4, 1886.

At Bowdoin Commencement, June 25, 1890 287

At Centennial Celebration of Bowdoin College, June 28, 1894 297

Love 306

Delivered at “Donation Party” at Harpswell, September 18, 1894.

The Deluded Hermit 310

Delivered at “Donation Party,” October 1, 1895.

Home 314

Delivered at “Donation Party,” October 19, 1897.

SERMONS:

The Prodigal’s Return 321

Wresting the Scriptures 338

The Beauty of the Autumn 357

To Bowdoin Students, October, 1889.

The Anchor of Hope 361

Preached at the Second Parish Church, Portland, August 5, 1900, “Old Home Week.”

A Prayer 367

Memorial Day, 1883, Brunswick.

VERSE:

From “The Phantoms of the Mind” 373

The Demon of the Sea 374

Portland 378

An Ode 379

Written for the Semi-centennial Celebration at Bowdoin College, August 31, 1852.

A Hymn 381

Written for the Celebration of the Twenty-eighth Anniversary of the Boston Seaman’s Friend Society, May 28, 1856.

True Poetry’s Task 382

MISCELLANEOUS:

Memories of Longfellow 387

Ben Bolt 394

Ma’am Price 404

The Discontented Brook 413

COMPLETE LIST OF BOOKS 423

ILLUSTRATIONS

Elijah Kellogg at 65. 1878 _Frontispiece_

FACING PAGE

Rev. Elijah Kellogg, 1796. Father of Elijah Kellogg. _From a Miniature_ 8

Mrs. Eunice McLellan Kellogg. Mother of Elijah Kellogg 28

House on Cumberland Street, Portland, Maine, in which Elijah Kellogg lived when a boy 48

Elijah Kellogg’s Church at Harpswell, Maine 56

Hannah Pearson Pomeroy Kellogg. Wife of Elijah Kellogg 68

Elijah Kellogg at 43. 1856 80

Elijah Kellogg’s Home at Harpswell, Maine 114

View of the Kellogg Homestead, Harpswell, Maine 140

Aunt Betsy and Uncle William Alexander, for fifty years nearest neighbors and dear friends of Elijah Kellogg 168

Casco Bay as seen near Kellogg Homestead, Harpswell, Maine 188

I. Frank Gilman Kellogg. Son of Elijah Kellogg. II. Mrs. Mary Kellogg Batchelder and Baby

Eleanor Batchelder. Daughter and granddaughter of Elijah Kellogg 202

Elijah Kellogg at 77. 1890 288

Elijah Kellogg at 80. 1893 306

Interior View of Elijah Kellogg’s Church at Harpswell, Maine 356

Elijah Kellogg at 86. 1899 384

ELIJAH KELLOGG: THE BOY

GEORGE LEWIS

It is much easier to read the boy after you see and know the man than it is to read the man when you see and know only the boy. Manhood may be the unfolding of the various forces and dispositions of boyhood, but this unfolding must take place before the boyhood itself can be comprehended. The mill must grind the wheat into flour and the flour be baked and eaten before we can know how good the kernels of wheat are. So we must see Elijah Kellogg as a man before we can fairly estimate him as a lad. When we hear him preach or when we read some of his books, then we know there was something in him when a child more than mere roguery and fun. Genius was there. Powers and faculties were there which, when trained by judgment and directed by piety, made him the preacher to whom men and women loved to listen, and the writer of books that captivated the hearts of all boys.

This man first saw the light May 20, 1813, in a house on Congress Street in Portland, Maine, where dwelt the pastor of the Second Congregational Church of the city. The baby was called Elijah because that was the father’s name; and the father at his birth had been called Elijah because of the famous prophet in Israel who bore the name. At the father’s birth it was said by his parents, “We must have a prophet in the family.” So the name Elijah was given to the boy and he proved a prophet not in name only, but in reality as well. The Rev. Elijah Kellogg, pastor of the Second Congregational parish in Portland during the latter part of the eighteenth and early part of the nineteenth centuries, was no mean representative of the old Hebrew prophet. The famous name sat well and appropriately upon the younger man. Had the Rev. Mr. Kellogg lived in the days of Ahab, of infamous memory, we may be very sure he would have stood beside the old prophet in his stout resistance to that wicked king; and had the Hebrew prophet been born in New England in the eighteenth century he would have sympathized warmly with his young namesake as he buckled on his belt and beat the drum for the patriots at the battle of Bunker Hill, and put forth all his skill and strength to free the colonies from the selfish and tyrannical rule of George III. There never yet was a true prophet of God in any land whose heart did not beat warmly for larger popular liberty and for a higher type of righteousness. Every prophet looks toward a sunrising that shall bring to earth a better day.

Elijah Kellogg, Sr., was but a boy at the opening of our Revolutionary struggle, but he was a boy of high spirit, of dauntless courage, and of most generous impulses. He derived these qualities of character from two distinct sources. These sources were, first, his ancestry, and second, the neighborhood where he was born, viz., South Hadley, Massachusetts. A boy could hardly be born and reared in the atmosphere of Hampshire County, Massachusetts, especially around Northampton and the Hadleys at that period of time, and be anything other than a freedom-loving patriot. It was a region of country favorable to the growth of heroes. Settled by stanch and sturdy Puritans, its people had for many years been sternly disciplined by the Indian troubles. No pusillanimous and faint-hearted men could by any means live long in that section. Only men of courage and strength could abide there. The Kelloggs proved what stuff they were made of, for the family had been living there for more than a century when Elijah came upon the scene. They were there when the regicide judges, Whalley and Goffe, pursued by the rancorous hatred of Charles II., sought an asylum in New England. Those men came first to New Haven for shelter, but even there they were not safe from the emissaries of the king. The protection, however, that New Haven could not afford them, Hadley could. Among the steel-hearted men of that up-river country they found safety. In that region was an association of liberty-loving souls, which, better than woods and better than caves, made life safe for those men who had helped behead a faithless king and had thereby given the cause of political and religious freedom a great uplift. Some towns are vastly better for boys to be born in than other towns are. South Hadley was one of the “better towns,” where Elijah Kellogg, Sr., saw the light for the first time in the year 1761.

Furthermore, there was good blood in the Kellogg veins irrespective of their geography. They were a worthy race anywhere and in all circumstances. Among the ancestors of this prophet-named lad were men who had borne the banner of the cross in Palestine with Richard of the Lion Heart, and others who had been true and stanch men in the Wars of the Roses and during the great reigns of Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth, and still others there were who a little later for their conscience’ sake had come to America. With such an ancestry as that and with a birthplace like South Hadley, it is no wonder that we find young Kellogg at Bunker Hill, where were fired the opening guns of the Revolution; or that a little later he endured the privations of Valley Forge and fought at Monmouth. He was, however, formed for scholarship rather than for military life, and after the war he entered and graduated at Dartmouth College. In 1788 the Second Church of Portland gave him a call to their pastorate. He accepted the call, and after this time Portland was his home as long as he lived.

Elijah Kellogg, Jr., had a good deal come to him from his father’s side of the house. He also had a good deal come to him from his mother’s side. This mother of his had once been Eunice McLellan. Her father was Captain Joseph McLellan and her mother was Mary, daughter of Hugh and Elizabeth McLellan, who had been among the earliest settlers of Gorham, Maine. Eunice, therefore (Mrs. Kellogg), was a McLellan of the McLellans. The family were Scotch-Irish people, and were descended from old Sir Hugh, who was knighted in the year 1515, and the race was one of strong family characteristics. Even at the present time they are somewhat clannish, and to this day throughout New England the name McLellan is regarded by him who bears it as a sort of patent of nobility; and all agree that there are few if any names in the country more worthy of respect and honor than that one.

Joseph McLellan was a born sailor if ever there was one, an adventurous rover of the seas, always happiest when on blue water with a good ship under his feet and a stiff breeze blowing him along his course. This man sent his own disposition down the family stream, and gave to his grandson Elijah a generous share of that same roving and adventurous spirit. The story is told that on the birth of an infant daughter to Joseph and Mary the parents decided to call her Esther, or as it was pronounced in those days, Easter. The babe was taken to the church that she might be baptized at the hands of the Rev. Mr. Deane. At the font the name of the child was handed to the clergyman, Easter, upon which he broke out, “Easter! Easter! That is no good name for a girl. Call her after my wife. Call her Eunice. Eunice, I baptize thee,” etc. The deed was done, and the child was Eunice in spite of both father and mother. The baby thus curiously named became in due time the wife of Parson Kellogg and the mother of the subject of this sketch. The McLellans were a canny folk. They had fought for Scottish liberty in many a sharp tug with the Saxons in the old days. They had helped fight the battles of the Covenanters at a later period, and now in the eighteenth century, transferred to America, they still kept up the fight and played their part on many a field, from Bunker Hill to Yorktown.

Blood will tell. Family traits will be transmitted. Sons will in some degree resemble sires. With an ancestry on both sides like that sketched above, it is no great wonder that the subject of this volume became the man he did. He had a good start. There was in him a goodly fund of inherited gifts. In the book,“Good Old Times,” which is Mr. Kellogg’s story of the McLellan family (his grandmother’s branch of it more particularly), the author lets us see how largely his own personal character was formed and his whole life influenced by the traditions and stories of the men and women of the family, recounted as those stories were at the fireside in the winter evenings, and told over again in the daytime as men and boys were doing their work in the woods and in the fields. The boy was perfectly happy when listening to these tales of pioneer life, made up as they largely were of homely and commonplace incidents and yet of really adventurous deeds. They were tales of conflict with the Indians, in which the McLellan fairness and good sense always won the respect of the savages and in most cases secured their good will and good treatment; of encounters with bears and wolves and other wild beasts, where man’s craft and skill gained the victory; and experiences with cold and hunger and hardships of the wilderness, in which Christian faith and the McLellan pluck overcame all odds and achieved a good measure of prosperity. Things like these were the folk-lore of the Gorham people rather than stories of round tables and fairies and ghosts and witches. This boy, like Carlyle, came to have a great admiration for the “man who could do things.” The ideal hero of Elijah Kellogg’s early boyhood was the hearty, warm-hearted, rough-handed, whole-souled pioneer who never turned his back upon a foe, whether biped or quadruped, and who never blenched in the face of a difficulty or a danger. He was the man who had in himself resources that were always called out and brought into exercise when obstacles were encountered, and invariably rose superior to the obstacles and made the man complete master of the situation, however bad that situation appeared. As he would have phrased it, he liked the man who never got whipped. The white man who could outwit an Indian or outhug a bear or outrun a pack of wolves was a man to be admired. The man who could fell a forest and clear a farm and put the soil to the production of corn and wheat was a man to be admired. This hero of Kellogg’s childhood was never entirely dethroned from the heart of the man. To the end of his days he loved that man who, using his own native strength, could bridle and ride the storm, or over the rudest billows of the ocean could bring his vessel into port.

It is almost superfluous to say that the man who wrote such books for boys as are the Elm Island and the Pleasant Cove series of stories was himself, when a lad, what would be called to-day an irrepressible. Without the least spice of malice or any suggestion of real harm in his nature, Elijah Kellogg was as full of mischief as a spring is of water, and it was simply impossible for parents and guardians to keep him within the bounds of Puritan propriety. It weighed not one jot with him that grave ministers and dignified elders of the church were among his forbears. It never occurred to him that because his father was a clergyman therefore he, the boy, should not go with other boys on Sunday morning to enjoy a frolic and take a swim in the waters of Back Cove, well out of sight from the parsonage windows, though of course such things on the Lord’s Day were strictly forbidden. Elijah’s proclivities were well known, and many were the family traps that were set for his ensnarement. But he had great facility for getting out of scrapes as well as getting into them. He did not, however, always escape detection. On one occasion, for example, the Sunday morning swim and games had been too fascinating for his boyish discretion, and had held him at the water until the public services for the morning at the church had closed. Elijah went home to meet his father, who had missed the boy from his proper seat in the family pew. That meeting between father and son can be more easily imagined than described, especially if the reader happens to be the child of a stern Puritan church-goer, and has himself been guilty of escapades on Sunday. To the question, “Where have you been this morning?” the boy replied without hesitation that he had been to the Methodist meeting. He heard his father preach every Sunday, and he had become a little tired of hearing one voice, and he wanted to hear what some other man had to say. Of course the next question was, “What was the preacher’s text?” Elijah was ready for this and at once gave chapter and verse and repeated the passage. But the inquisition did not stop here; he must now give some account of the sermon. This seemed a perfectly easy matter to the young culprit. He had heard a good many sermons, and he felt very sure that he could report one even though he had not listened to it at all. But here he was caught. He had never heard anything but the rigid, old-school, Calvinistic doctrines, and it never entered his head that one minister did not always preach like another. It was therefore a sound Calvinistic sermon that this young reporter put into the mouth of the Methodist minister. He was soon brought up short with the paternal remark: “Elijah, stop right there. Now I know you are lying. No Methodist minister ever preached like that. Your whole story is false. You have spent your morning down by the water.”

When Elijah was some ten or eleven years old he was taken to Gorham, and spent some months in the home of Mrs. Lothrop Lewis. Mrs. Lewis had a young daughter whom she wished put into a Portland school, and an exchange of children was made with the Kelloggs, they taking the girl into their home and Mrs. Lewis taking the boy into hers. This exchange was in many respects a grateful one to the boy. The country was the place for him. There was more freedom there, more room and more chance for fun than in town. Perhaps, too, the fact that his father was nine miles away had its alleviations, for the presence of a father, however dearly he was loved, was a damper on the spirit of prankishness. While with Mrs. Lewis, Elijah certainly made mischief for everybody, but at the same time he made friends of everybody, for none could help loving the bright and lively fellow. In due time the boy went back to Portland. But the city was no place for a lad like him. He chafed under its restraints, and cared but little for its schools. He was like a sea-gull shut up in a cage. As the imprisoned gull pines for the freedom of wind and wave so did the heart of Elijah Kellogg long for the free winds and the rolling waters and the ships that went sailing away to distant ports. It was a longing that could not be suppressed, and no one can really blame him that before he was thirteen years old he had found his way on board a ship and become a sailor in downright earnest. I am sure that the boys who read his books are not sorry that the hand that wrote those stories gained some of its cunning by pulling ropes, furling and unfurling sails, taking his trick at the wheel, and sharing actively in whatever pertained to the handling and management of vessels. He loved the sea, and was fascinated by the strange sights and sounds of foreign countries. He was a keen observer for a boy just entering his teens, and he gained much valuable knowledge as he wandered round the world borne along by the wings of a ship. But in his roving he never for one moment forgot his home. His heart was warm and true to the friends who were there. Letters written to his father from different quarters of the world are now in existence, and they bear full testimony to his ardent affection for home and friends. His love for friends was perhaps the strongest element of his nature, even stronger than his love of adventure, and in due time that love brought him back from his travels no longer to sail the seas except in small boats near the shore. In the story of “Charlie Bell,” Mr. Kellogg (unconsciously, no doubt) has given us the picture of a boy’s nature and disposition very much like his own.