By Faith and By Love. Beverly E. Williams
subject that semester.
Even with scholarship aid, Martin had to stop once for a semester, and again for a year, to make enough money to continue his studies. By the time he graduated in 1924, at the age of twenty-three, he had decided to become a Baptist minister.
My freshman year at college, he recalled, the Southern Baptists held conferences for college students all over the South, and since one was on the Furman campus I could afford to attend. Some of the speakers were very interesting to me, especially Dr. Gordon Poteat. He himself was a Furman graduate and had spent a number of years in China. He told us things about China we had never heard.
But the recent college graduate did not have funds for the three years of graduate school necessary to earn a divinity degree. Martin learned that a high school in the mountains of western North Carolina needed teachers. Although the salary was small, he thought that he could pay back some of his college loans and save for seminary if he lived at the boarding school and did not have to pay for an apartment or groceries. Before the days of regional high schools, the church-run school was for students who had no other way to get an education beyond eighth grade. Martin had a happy two years there, teaching mathematics, history, religion, and even coaching the Yancey Collegiate Institute baseball team.
During school holidays he hiked in the mountains.
You have heard of “purple mountains.” Well, I caught them that way again the other afternoon just at sunset. Only once or twice a year you really can see them like that, just the right combination of colors in the leaves, clouds, and sunsets. But it lives with you a long, long time afterward.
Martin also found that he loved teaching, and he appreciated his mountain students and their fierce desire to learn. But he was twenty-five years old and needed to get to graduate school if he was ever to become a minister. In 1926 the Southern economy was so bad that he hadn’t saved much money at all. He might as well go on to seminary and borrow the money he needed. Martin’s replacement, glad to have any kind of job, went to work at the Burnsville, North Carolina, school for only room and board.
As much as he felt at home in the mountains, Martin headed for a city, Louisville, Kentucky, and its Southern Baptist seminary.
I found it exciting. It was stimulating. The one thing was the wide variety of students from all over the South, but also from other parts of the country and even foreign countries. I had not been exposed, in my Furman days, to quite such a mixture. At Furman we had only one Chinese student. There had been a few students from other parts of the United States, but not like in Louisville. Yes, the foreign students were all interesting to me.
At that time, all the students studying for the ministry were men. Women who wanted to have a career in Protestant churches were confined to classes in music and religious education. For the men, the course of study was a difficult three-year graduate program that included Hebrew and Greek languages, church history, and preaching.
The professor who made the biggest impression on me taught missions. He was always stimulating. He met with the student groups and talked about the practical problems that ministers who go overseas to work might face. The man who taught us Greek didn’t stand for any nonsense. But most of the students were so terribly afraid of him that they just sat quietly, struggling with the language. There was one teacher, an old war horse. He fought the Civil War all over again.
Martin had to study hard; he was one of those struggling with Greek. And work on campus to pay for his tuition cut into precious study time.
Besides my jobs at the seminary, one summer I worked for the church association up in the mountains of Kentucky. We taught classes and took a census of each community. I also worked with boys from inner-city Louisville. I was assigned to a boys’ group, teenage and younger. One Saturday I took them to a park which was not too far from the seminary. It was a revelation to find that these youngsters living close to that park had never been to a place with trees and grass and a stream. They just went wild. They thought it was something out of their world.
Many years later, a younger friend who had also studied at the Louisville graduate school asked Martin if he had stayed in awe of those intimidating teachers.
No, by the second year we were more relaxed. The newness had worn off and our fear of those lofty professors had diminished, so we could be ourselves a little more.
Martin stayed at the seminary for two of the three years needed to get his degree and once again ran out of money. By this time the beginnings of the great Depression made it impossible for students to find part-time jobs, since too many people were competing for too few positions.
But schools always needed teachers, and now Martin was an experienced one. He accepted an offer to teach not far from Burnsville, where he had begun his career. Like the Yancey Collegiate Institute, Mars Hill College, in a village near Asheville, North Carolina, had been founded as a high school for mountain students. While there were still a few twelfth graders, most were in their first and second year of college. Martin was hired to teach mathematics, Bible, and church history.
I also taught a world history course when they had nobody to fill in.
Unlike his replacement at Yancey, Martin was paid a small salary. However, in 1929, tuition was so low at Mars Hill College that teachers were paid little besides their room and board. Tuition for a semester was $27.50. “Table Board” (food) was $50.00 per semester for all who worked in the dining hall at least forty minutes each day; all others had to pay $65.00 for each eighteen-week term. A furnished room with “steam heat, electric lights, and water” was $50.00, with each of the two roommates paying half. Lab fees ranged from $4.00 to $8.00 per term. A diploma for the associates of arts degree cost each graduate $3.00. While these prices seem laughingly low today, college was still beyond the reach of most farm families who had almost no cash and who traded farm crops for coffee, salt, and shoes.
Coming in from an educational conference late one evening, Martin wrote to a friend, “I’ve only had a couple of winks but have to go to class and hear what my young hopefuls have learned about Russia since I last met with them.” Another letter was interrupted when a student came to the teacher’s bedroom asking for help with the algebra homework.
You would like him. He’s from way back in the mountains, almost grown before he went to school, but is determined to study medicine and help his community. Oh, I almost forgot. We have something I’ll bet your campus doesn’t—forty cases of mumps. One of my classes has been almost wrecked, and a good many of the “survivors” have been wishing I’d get sick, but so far I’ve disappointed ’em.
When the mumps epidemic was over, coach Martin took the women’s debate team to a tournament in Asheville. Although that city was only twenty miles away, 1920s rough and winding mountain roads made the trip a challenge. But a trip to town was a treat, especially for the young women who had strict curfew hours, especially on school nights.
We left Asheville about 8:00 p.m. but a clogged gas line and a flat tire delayed us so that it was midnight before we got home. Pretty serious for the young women to get in that late, but no trouble from the Dean of Women yet.
Martin loved his job, the students who reminded him of the ones at Yancey Institute, and the chance to return to the mountains of North Carolina. During school vacations he and a fellow teacher world explore; other holidays he would take off alone with only a bedroll, a cook pot and some oatmeal. On these hikes he covered much of the area that is now the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Some of the friendships Martin made among the teachers at Mars Hill lasted the rest of their lives, or his.
But the small college in the little village was not immune to outside pressures. Once Martin could not get his paycheck cashed because the bank failed. Students were having difficulties paying the small tuition. And the Ku Klux Klan tried to penetrate the college. While the teacher from South Carolina used to joke that he was too poor to pay the membership fees, and especially to slit up a perfectly good bed sheet, he was troubled by racial hatreds and by people who wanted to divide rather than to heal. Although by this time his grandfather had died, Martin was still determined to use his life in honor of the man who had saved Jasper.
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