Bro. Isaac Hucaby

It has been said that Isaac Hucaby inspired thousands with both his sermons and his Christian life. When he died at age 78, he was one of the area's great Baptist preachers. During his ministry, Bro. Hucaby preached over 1,300 funerals, performed over 500 baptisms and over 300 marriages. He not only performed weddings in churches, but also under sycamore trees and along a dark roadway with only a cars headlights. About the large number of funerals he conducted, someone once told him, “It sounds like the dead people like to hear you, the same as the living.

Bro. Huckaby once said he had performed baptisms from the Cumberland River to farm ponds. He preferred performing baptisms in creeks because he said the service seemed more meaningful. Once he was baptizing 24 people in a rather shallow creek. The last man weighed 220

pounds and instead of the usual procedure where the minister lifts the individual out of the water, Brother Hucaby's foot slipped and he went under the water, instead. The man he was baptizing reached down and picked the soaked preacher out of the water.

Bro. Hucaby was born on July 1, 1909 into a family which had four separate sets of twins, he and his twin sister were the two youngest of thirteen children. All of the twins were sets of a boy and a girl, except one set of boys who died in infancy. The family had a large two-story house located on a 220 acre farm in the Burfield community near Barrier in Wayne County, Kentucky.

He was ordained in 1930. There was a time when he was pastor at five Churches. They were quarter-time churches, which meant once a month preaching. He would do the preaching on Satur­day afternoon and then Sunday afternoon. During his first years as a minister, Hucaby walked 15 miles to church. He later rode a horse and in 1934 purchased an automobile to travel to the country churches.

Hucaby entered the ministry at age 18 after being converted when he was 10-years-old. He began his preaching career at the Old Beaver Creek Church, now l75 feet under water at Wolf Creek Dam. His second pastorate was at Gap Creek Baptist Church, originally called Otter Creek Church. He was pastor at the Gap Creek Church for 12 years in succession, away two years and then back two years. He laid the foundation for a full-time church with preaching every Sunday. During his years at Gap Creek Church he also preached at Bethel Church in Parmleysville, Big Springs Church, New Hope Church on Beaver Creek near Cooper, Sandusky’s Chapel Baptist Church, Pleasant Hill Baptist Church and various other churches across the county.

It is safe to say that Isaac Hucaby probably preached at least once in every Baptist church in the region, serving as pastor of a variety of churches in Clinton, Cumberland, Pulaski and Wayne counties, including a brief pastorate at my church, Clear Fork, in 1933. He retired from the active pastorate in 1971 and then dedicat­ed himself to supply work and evangelistic work.

Bro. Hucaby married Lena Campbell in 1933, and lived with her until her death in 1970. After 27 months, he married Eula Bartleson, the widow of James Bartleson. He last married Dona Bertram, the widow of Arnold Bertram of the Windy community. He died on Dec. 14, 1987 at the age of 78. He and Lena are buried at Elk Spring Cemetery in Monticello, Kentucky. He truly was one of all-time great Baptist preachers from our area. (Information for this article was obtained from a Dec. 17, 1987 article by Linda Jones/Wayne County Outlook).

Bible Mission School and Orphanage

In a Kentucky Historical Society article for Explore KY History, author Tim Talbott, my cousin, wrote that Wayne County native John Samson Keen received the call to preach while a young man and by age twenty was riding a large circuit in southcentral Kentucky. A few years later he received the call to start a school and the place was in the Highway community of Clinton County.

John and Hannah Keen's school grew so much that in 1890, they saw the need for a better building and room for more students. Money was raised from all over the country and in 1894 there was a new and better building. From that point on, Bible Mission School grew at an even more rapid pace. Students were coming in from all over the United States. By comparison, according to Kentucky Public Documents, Vol. 4 of the Kentucky General Assembly, during the 1896-97 school year, Albany High School, now in its tenth year, had 154 students and three teachers, while Bible Mission School, in its third year in the new building, had 187 students and nine teachers.

Around 1900, John S. Keen turned the school over to W. H. Evans and became a minister in Texas. By 1904, Evans had also left for Texas after enrollment at Bible Mission School had started to decline, probably for two main reasons: a health epidemic and a new school that had opened in Columbia,

Bible Mission School closed in 1905, but it would later be celebrated because of a few things, including Dr. Alexander B. Mackey, president of Trevecca Nazarene University in Nashville, and Rev. Robert Johnson, whose son, Keen was Kentucky's forty-fifth governor, were students there.

In 1954, Eula Gamblin Mackey, whose husband, William Hunt Mackey, was a relative of Dr. Mackey, wrote in The New Era newspaper that when the U.S. had 45 states and five territories, each state and territory was represented at the school at Highway.

She also wrote that camp meetings were held each spring and fall in two tabernacles that were located on the grounds and that four or five thousand people attended with singing, praying and shouting taking place all over the school grounds. "People prayed through and were sanctified. Highway [community] was a holy place," she said.

Get this...when the Board of Regents met to decide the location for Lindsey Wilson Junior College, Highway lacked one vote getting it. One vote. "At the time," Mackey wrote, "Highway already had the buildings and Columbia had to build them." Go figure.

A marker erected at Highway Cemetery, submitted by John and Mareeda Gibson in 2006, signifies that location as the burial ground of 25 to 30 orphans who died during an epidemic [probably typhoid fever and/or Tuberculosis] at the orphanage at Highway in the late 1890's. It states that eight of the orphans died in one week and that no names have been found.

It is known that Mahala Reed Keenan, a revivalist minister who rode a white donkey side saddle through the hills of Kentucky, singing and preaching as she traveled, moved to Highway in 1896, wanting her sons to be educated there. But, she soon became sick with tuberculosis and needed a healthier place to live and breathe. In 1899, she and her son, Elva, who had the same illness, undertook a wagon journey to Floresville, Texas, but Mahala died shortly after her arrival there. Elva died four months later.

Historical Marker #1927 in the yard at Highway Church of the Nazarene tells about Bible Mission School and Orphanage that operated from 1891 to 1905 just past the church on Groce Gibson Road.

Tim Talbott's article

The Apollo 11 Mission: Fifty Years Ago

Where were you the day men walked on the moon? It was on July 20, 1969, fifty years ago today, that the world collectively held its breath as astronaut Neil Armstrong slowly backed out of the Lunar Module Eagle and cautiously climbed down a nine-rung ladder before stepping foot on the surface of the moon. “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind,” were his now immortalized words. In the photo, his fellow astronaut, Buzz Aldrin, salutes the U.S flag during the Apollo 11 mission.