For the past year I have been engrossed with researching and writing the life of George Braxton Taylor, who is best known in Baptist history for founding in 1886 the Sunbeams, the earliest organization to teach Baptist children about missions.
Taylor himself grew up immersed in Baptist missions. His grandfather, James B. Taylor, was the first head of the Foreign (now International) Mission Board and his parents, Susan Braxton Taylor and George Boardman Taylor, were pioneer missionaries from Virginia to Rome, Italy. At age 12, young George accompanied his parents on an epic trip across the Atlantic and Europe to settle in Italy. He learned Italian and early became absorbed in the world beyond Virginia.
Fred Anderson
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His parents sent him back to Virginia for a proper education at Richmond College, the Baptist school which his grandfather helped in its infancy and which his father had attended. It was while at the college at age 16 that George began keeping a daily diary. For the next 65 years he never missed a day’s entry. Even when he broke his arm, he dictated the diary entries.
Taylor was president of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and his diary and other personal papers were sent to the Society after his death in 1942. I always knew that the diary was in the collection and from time to time I would reach into the boxes and pull out a year to use for some article or program. But not until this project did I undertake to read all of the volumes, page by page, day by day. The surviving diary volumes total 34 and some 12,500 pages. He wrote in shorthand which was easily decipherable and in an engaging style.
Night after night (for there is no daylight time for such a mammoth project) I read in the diary, making notes and discovering who all the people were who were mentioned. I have studied many a person through the years and portrayed quite a few; but until Taylor, I had never become so emotionally attached to a person who had died before I was born.
Taylor brought me into his life by giving bits and pieces which in time were fitting like some giant jigsaw puzzle scattered in so many volumes. I knew the larger framework of his life — his childhood, his education, his pastorates — from other sources but the diary gave color and flesh to the bare bones.
I learned the mundane and the sublime. I learned that he slept with the window open even in the coldest weather; that he always rose at six o’clock (unless he was “simmering” or lying awake contemplating the day); that he spent every hour to its fullest; that his favorite food was oysters which he often enjoyed at breakfast, lunch and dinner.
George and Jessie Taylor are buried in Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery.
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I learned that he was family-centered. His parents, siblings, aunts and uncles and kissing cousins were the closest circle of his world. I was reminded year after year about his love for one woman, “the beautiful Jessie Cabell” of Nelson County. The couple married in 1888 “on a golden mid-winter day” and in 1892 she gave birth to their only child, a boy whom they named Cabell. Jessie died the next year and George was faced with rearing their son and life alone without a helpmeet. He never remarried. He kept her wedding picture on his dresser and he sprinkled the diary with remembrances of her.
He had two rural “fields of churches” in Virginia: Appomattox and “the Hollins field” outside Roanoke. The churches most associated with him were Enon, across the road from Hollins College where he also was chaplain and Bible teacher, and Troutville. These churches in particular became as family for the widowed pastor.
He set a schedule which would have been impossible if he had been married. He regularly made between six and 15 pastoral visits a day, often presented four preparations on a given Sunday, and cared for generations of “Hollins girls.” He walked everywhere he went. He confided in the diary and he wrote in such a style that it was almost as if the diary was a person, perhaps his alter-ego or even a spouse-substitute.
He loved yet worried over his son. Cabell came down with tuberculosis while a college student and it brought him to an early death. There was a time when half of the father’s income was going to support the son. Taylor shared with the diary about his disappointments and frustrations over Cabell as well as his embarrassingly modest finances. Sometimes it was painful for me to read the entries and I felt like an intruder in the dust.
And dust it was! The diaries had never been handled. They were chocked full of snapshots, postcards, telegrams and yellowed newspaper clippings. They still had the original straight pins and rusty clips. For awhile, I even broke out in hives handling them and wondering if they contained paper mites or if I was allergic to the acid in the paper. Between hives and worry about tetanus from the rust, it was no small thing to read the diary.
Taylor’s days were filled with the glad and the sad — sunbeams and shadows — and hence the title for the book which has emerged from this study. There were terrible tragedies in his life and the way in which he handled them becomes an inspiration for today’s readers. Taylor wrote 637 biographical sketches of Virginia Baptist ministers which were published in four volumes, yet, after his death, no one had written a full biography of him. I felt that it was long overdue.
On the Saturday before last Easter, I bought a lily and headed to Hollywood Cemetery in Richmond to decorate his grave. I found the three tombstones — George, Jessie and Cabell — and Taylor’s contained the following inscription: “Pastor for over 50 years; Founder of the Sunbeams; Author — Teacher of the Bible.” It was a strange feeling to stand at the grave, knowing all the personal details from the diary, realizing the sunbeams and the shadows, appreciating his pure life. He deserved a thousand lilies.
(Sunbeams & Shadows is available from the Virginia Baptist Historical Society for $12 including shipping and handling. Order from VBHS, Box 34, University of Richmond, VA 23173.)
Fred Anderson is executive director of the Virginia Baptist Historical Society and the Center for Baptist Heritage and Studies, located on the campus of the University of Richmond. He may be contacted at [email protected] or at P.O. Box 34, University of Richmond, VA 23173.