Swanee River

      Most articles on these history blogs have a very direct connection with Watch Tower history and pre-history. But others have a more tenuous link. This is one of the latter.

     Stephen Foster (1826-1864) is sometimes called “the father of American popular music.” He wrote over 200 songs, some of which are still performed today. Many suggest the music of the southern states, and were performed by minstrel groups, although apparently Foster only ever visited the south once in his life. Camptown Races, My Old Kentucky Home, Beautiful Dreamer, and Swanee River (Old Folks at Home) are among his titles. The latter became the state song of Florida in 1935.

     When he died in 1864 he was buried in the Allegheny cemetery, as were a good number of his family. Most readers here will know that CTR’s parents, siblings and other relatives were also buried in a family plot in this cemetery.

The Tampa Bay Times carried an interview with Mabel Packard in its issue of 24 January 1960.

     Mabel Packard was the daughter of Joseph Lytle Russell, CTR’s father, through his second wife, Emma Ackley. So she was CTR's half-sister. She was born in 1881 and when about 15, Stephen Foster’s brother, Morriston Foster (1823-1904) was a next door neighbor. From him she got the information that one of Stephen’s most famous songs that starts “Way down upon the Swanee River” was originally called something else – “the Pee Dee River.”  “Swanee” sounded a lot better and the name stuck.

     The house where Mabel was living at the time of the interview was the address for her mother Emma Russell, and also her aunt Maria Frances Russell from 1922 until their deaths. Emma died in 1929 and Maria died in 1938, but according to the newspaper cutting Mabel did not move into the area until 1941. That could well be an error. The obituary for Maria in 1938 mentioned a surviving niece, Mrs Richard Packard of "this city." Mabel died aged 80 towards the end of 1961, and is buried in the same family plot as Emma and Maria.

Herald of Gospel Liberty, July 11, 1912

This was a reaction to "Pastor Russell's Newspaper Sermons." This was included in an longer article complaining that Mormon-owned newspapers would not carry paid ads for anti-Mormon pamphlets. The reference to "Patent Inside" pages was to preprinted newspaper pages sold to newspaper publishers to provide them with content at a nominal cost, about what the publisher would have to pay for blank paper alone. Herewith the article extract:

We notice, too, that Mr. Russell, the Millenial Dawnist, gets his sermons in many of these "patent insides." Think of it! We know enthusiastic members of Protestant churches who publish papers, using the "patent insides," carrying to their readers each week "a well-loaded barrel" of Russellism. Do you suppose you can find a single Russellite editor who would be carrying with his consent a sermon against Russellism? It is time for Protestant Christians to be waking up we cannot afford to swallow everything whole which may be pushed at us. Indeed we cannot, and it is time for us to begin to choose the kind of reading matter that comes into our homes each week, and even daily. It is an insult to have a big dish of Mormonism and Russellism pushed at us in every literary meal we get.

From: Light on Mormonism, October-December 1929

 The editor published part of a very long letter from a former Mormon bishop who was "caught" between Mormonism and the Bible Students, attracted to both but part of neither. 

A "COME - BACK" OF RUSSELLISM 

Our article on this active and dangerous sect in LIGHT for December was entirely kindly and Christly, though as plain as need be; just as a surgeon must sometimes be very plain with his knife. But the response of the ex- Mormon bishop in Ogden, Utah, is disappointing. He writes a long letter, in a spirit which we do not like to see in anybody, and which is never justifiable; especially toward one who has been always kind and acted only in good conscience in this matter. We can best show needed facts by quoting a little from the letter. But please remember in reading it that its writer is a combined product of both Mormonism and Russellism, and that both systems are about equally evident in his letter. We hardly need say that from beginning to end there is hardly an assertion that is even based on fact, while most seem only ventings of enmity against the Christian church and its Bible truth, which often characterizes the work of Russellism everywhere.

  

The Bible Students, as you are pleased to call them, are preaching the message of the Kingdom of Heaven which is at hand, and which means the complete deliverance of the race from bondage of sin and death, Priests and Preachers, Hell-fire screachers and blasphemous defamers of God's name in general.

On the other hand, the antitypes of those mentioned above including yourself are preaching that God made man and with a foreknowledge that he would fall, then placed in him a soul that cannot die and prepared a torture chamber called hell in which to forever wreak out upon them the wrath of a God whom the Bible says is love. And remember, Rev., not over 3 percent of the earth's people ever heard of the only name whereby man can be saved.