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Archiver > CATAWBA-WEST > 1997-08 > 0872649948


From: SHERRILL U WILLIAMS< >
Subject: ABERNATHY
Date: Tue, 26 Aug 1997 21:45:48, -0500


PART TWO: ROBERT LABAN ABERNATHY.

Robert Laban Abernethy was born on his father's farm, a few miles
northwest of Lincolnton on April 3, 1822, one hundred and twenty-five
years ago. His boyhood and youth were spent doing customary tasks of
home, farm, and field, without the advantage of a single day of
schooling of any kind whatsoever. Let me repeat this -- Robert Laban
Abernethy never went into a school room of any sort a single day in
all his young life. Here is a note for Ripley and his Believe It or
Not -- this boy was taught the alphabet by an old negro slave from
letters and words occurring on flour sacks, molasses barrels, tubs
and bales of various kinds found around the farm house and barn.
Abraham Lincoln in his obscure Kentucky home in those same years of
the nineteenth century was able to spend several months in primary
schools, but this child of Piedmont, Carolina had not a book of his
own nor a day in even a lone school house. An old German grandmother
gave him encouragement in attendance at a rural Sunday School and
helped him in memorizing long Bible passages, in which art the boy
became a genius, surpassing all the boys and grown men of the
community. As Robert Laban grew older his desire for knowledge
increased so rapidly and with such vigor that long miles never stood
in his way in search for a book of history, arithmetic, grammar, or
any subject that would help him in learning. At one time in his early
teens he is said to have gone into several counties hunting for an
arithmetic, and by the light of pine knots he would digest and master
the subject until he could solve every problem. As for history, he
early in life could tell the dates and events of all the great
movements from the earliest recorded happenings in Egypt or Babylon
up until the day in which he lived. When it came to English grammar
this young scholar had not a peer in all the Catawba Valley, and his
fame reached out to all sections of the state, before he was twenty
years of age.
Thus he proceeded year after year in his determined manner of
securing the fundamentals of that process and power known as
education. Robert Laban was never too tired, too busy, too occupied
to apply his mind to all the various subjects of human knowledge and
to give his all in finding a way out of that rural darkness into the
great broad fields of learning. So by the time he had reached his
twenty-first year the name of Abernethy was known far and wide as the
symbol of the trained mind and the profound intellect. Throughout
central North Carolina went the word -- "Ask Abernethy if you want to
know." Side by side with this youth there was another youth, precious
to all unforgetting Methodists, Brantley Yorke by name who had also
come up the long hard painful way of reading, writing, and arithmetic.
These two in those days went forth like apostles of old to tell
others what they knew. They held brief schools, institutes, they were
called, lasting for six weeks or more all over this section of the
state, teaching, preaching, propagating the theme of education.
Abernethy and Yorke, sixty or seventy years before Aycock and McIver
and Alderman, pioneered in the glorious enterprise of making literate
the people of our backward commonwealth. North Carolina will never be
able to pay such men as these who helped carve out of the densest
ignorance a pathway for modern public school systems. Let it be said
here and now that these two devout Methodist teachers blazed a trail
and left their lights burning for untold thousands following in the
broad highway of truth and right. <to be continued>
[NOTE: Brantly York went on to establish an academy near Durham, NC
which became Trinity College, and is today known as Duke University.
I have my great grandfather's Certificate of Penmanship earned at one
of Brantly York's "institutes" held in the Catawba County area.]

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