Page:Portland, Oregon, its History and Builders volume 2.djvu/227

Rh life on Clifty creek, seven miles from Somerset, Kentucky. There he erected two mills and manufactured fiour, saltpetre, Epsom salts, turpentine, linseed oil and gunpowder. Though he had no educational privileges in early youth, he became well versed in law and history. His wife was a woman of unusual personality, of strong religious tendencies, enthusiastically supporting the Methodist church and openly antagonistic to the use of liquor, then so common. Samuel Kelly died October 13, 1834, his wife surviving until the 26th of January, 1841. Their children were Clinton, Albert, Temperance, Gilby, Cyrene, Sena, Gilmore, Samuel, Rachel, Tabitha and Thomas. Of these Clinton, Gilby, Albert and Samuel were itinerant ministers and Sena became the wife of Josiah Godbey, also a preacher.

Clinton Kelly spent his boyhood on the home farm with little chance for the attainment of an education. He came of a Methodist home and a consecrated mother; it was also the home of the traveling preacher; hence it is not strange that Clinton and three of his brothers became Methodist circuit riders. He was converted at eighteen and so marked was the change that it was evident to his neighbors and friends what his misson to the world would be. He began preachng, usmg the second story of his father's house as a meeting place. With his yoke ot steers he hauled logs with which he built a school house and taught the first school in his home neighborhood. Soon afterwards he and his brothers built the church, the site of which was and is still called Mount Zion, and there they continued to preach the Gospel for some time.

When nineteen years of age Clinton Kelly was united in marriage to Miss Mary Baston and to obtain the license fee, for which he had to pay a dollar, he made and sold in Somerset a barrel of cider, crushing the apples by hand. In 1834 he attended the annual conference in Kentucky, -became an itinerant minister and was assigned to the Elizabethtown circuit. He traveled up and down the knobs and vales of Kentucky, enduring privations as a good soldier of Jesus for many years. He was self-taught; rather he was taught of the Spirit. He had three months of schooling; nay, his whole life was spent in the school of Christ, and he who learns in that school is truly wise. Diligent application at the pine-knot blaze gave him a start, and a life of reading and study rounded out a well formed character. But his chief study was the Bible. He carried a testament in his pocket and read on the way to his appointment or while waiting at the mill for his grist; no precious moment was lost. He talked well upon all subjects but the Bible was his text-book, the love of God his theme. He had studied to such purpose that where others stumbled he quoted correctly no matter what the passage; his expositions were rich and clear, for they were Spirit-illumined. His illustrations appealed to the masses; his pictures were of life as he saw it every day; no incident was too homely to point a lesson. As his family increased he worked the harder, his shoemaker's kit dividing the time with his books on long and lonesome horseback journeys. Perhaps it was a basket to be woven as he rode or some other useful art was brought into play, for in those days men and women did everything and children early fell into the habit.

Twice his Kentucky home was bereft of wife and mother. His first wife died leaving five sons: Plympton, Hampton, Archon, Calmet and Bengal. All of these have crossed the flood. The oldest and last to go was Plympton Kelly, founder of Kelly Homestead Farm near Portland. Not long after losing his first wife Clinton Kelly married Miss Jane Burns, who died three years later, leaving a daughter, Mary Jane. On the nth of March, 1840, he wedded Moriah Maldon Grain, a daughter of John and Sarah (Rousseau) Grain, of Pulaski county, and a granddaughter of Samuel Grain, of Culpeper county, 'irginia. who was a member of the United States navy during the Revolutionary war and in 1797 removed to Kentucky. In the maternal line Mrs. Kelly was descended from Hillaire Rousseau, a Huguenot who came from France and settled in Virginia following the revocation of the edict of Nantes by Louis XIV, October 22, 1685. Her great-grandfather, David Rousseau, wedded Mary Harrison, a niece of Benjamin Harrison, a signer of the Declaration of Independence.