at the bountiful table and clothed from the domestic loom . . . .
In that country at that time there was great scarcity of books."

The journals of itinerant ministers through the Valley of
Virginia and the Carolina piedmont zone yield precious mementoes
of the people, their longing after the things of the spirit, and
their pitiful isolation from the regular preaching of the gospel.
These missionaries were true pioneers in this Old Southwest,
ardent, dauntless, and heroic--carrying the word into remote
places and preaching the gospel beneath the trees of the forest.
In his journal (1755-6), the Rev. Hugh McAden, born in
Pennsylvania of Scotch-Irish parentage, a graduate of Nassau Hall
(1753), makes the unconsciously humorous observation that
wherever he found Presbyterians he found people who "seemed
highly pleased, and very desirous to hear the word"; whilst
elsewhere he found either dissension and defection to Baptist
principles, or "no appearance of the life of religion." In the
Scotch-Irish Presbyterian settlements in what is now Mecklenburg
County, the cradle of American liberty, he found "pretty serious,
judicious people" of the stamp of Moses, William, and James
Alexander. While traveling in the upper country of South
Carolina, he relates with gusto the story of "an old gentleman
who said to the Governor of South Carolina, when he was in those
parts, in treaty with the Cherokee Indians that 'he had never
seen a shirt, been in a fair, heard a sermon, or seen a minister
in all his life.' Upon which the governor promised to send him up
a minister, that he might hear one sermon before he died." The
minister came and preached; and this was all the preaching that
had been heard in the upper part of South Carolina before Mr.
McAden's visit.