Federal Writers' Project – Life Histories/2022/Fall/Section093/E. J. Tull

Overview

E. J. Tull was born in 1844 and lived in Georgia when he was interviewed by Jacques H. Upshaw under the Works Project Administration in the summer of 1934.

Biography

Early Life

An early illustration of the University of Wisconsin campus, c. 1885.

As a young boy, E. J. Tull was raised in Wisconsin. He remarks his early life as so long ago that "buckskin was still commonly worn in Wisconsin where [he] lived." Daily transportation was much less advanced then with the main travel being by riverboat or horseback; railroads were uncommon in the mid to late 1800s. His main way of transportation was firing his own river-boat; a route he recalls is the Mississippi River between LaCrosse and St. Paul.

Tull completed his degree at the University of Wisconsin in under 3 years. To pay for college tuition, he ran chores at the local boarding house, such as ringing the bell and serving meals. A large facet of his income came from working in harvest fields. The agricultural industry during from the end of the 19th century to the start of the 20th century observed a transition in supply and demand. Tull was involved in this industry since a young boy, especially during the Great Agricultural Transition. The need for produce from America's Midwest encouraged families to make a living in this industry if not work as a farmer sometime in their lives; Tull was no exception.

He had a son at 25.

Career

After college, Tull went on to teach at a small, all-boys, Christian school near his home in Wisconsin at 17 years old. He recalls opening each school day with reading a chapter from the Bible and reading a prayer, which was a commonly accepted practice in most schools of the upper Midwest region then.

Other jobs included managing his own butcher shop and post office. Throughout his life, Tull collected books of all genres, particularly poetry. He keeps nearly 1,700 volumes in his library located in Atlanta, Georgia. His agricultural skills were used later in his career life; he bought his own mill for $85,000 in Idaho and ground silver and gold ores.

Later Life

Once he moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains, Tull opened his own small Sunday School at Oak Hill Church through petition. He opened it to reignite religious fervor in the local youth. A Presbyterian by birth, Tull was particularly interested in keeping young people interested in the church; this was influenced by his time teaching at a Christian school during his early career. Tull had been living alone in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Georgia since 1912 with his pet dog, cat, pigeon, and rooster, whom he calls his family. He liked to grow produce, make new friends, and read in his spare time.

Social Context

The Great Agricultural Transition

From the late 1800s into the early 1900s, there was an increasing demand of produce from “distant, rural farmers to support their growing communities.” The shift in demand during the turn of the century allowed for a greater need for farms, especially in America’s Midwest region. Families of farms in these regions worked in harvest fields. Crisis and change within the agricultural industry required higher production efficiency. “In the early 1900s, more than one of every three Americans lived on farms, a number greater than that at any other point in our country's history.” During the Second Industrial Revolution, however, the number of the farming populations decreased as the working class moved to urban cities and to the blooming northeast. The turn of the century observed a metamorphosis of the agricultural industry.

Sunday school in America, c. 1900.

Christianity in the Upper Midwest

At the turn of the centuries, the spread of different Christian denominations across America’s regions largely shaped the American religious demographic and denominations' church distribution. In the rise of Sunday schools, organizational life was sought to be reintegrated post-Civil War. Communities representing minority denominations like Presbyterian and Baptist struggled to reestablish their presence as "true and pure churches: true to the historic doctrines of the faith as they perceived them, and pure from what they saw as the polluting influences of an increasingly corrupt modern culture,” that is, amongst the rapidly growing Fundamentalism movement. In the early 1900s, many Americans living in the Upper Midwest felt the social consequences of evangelical Christianity, whether it be attending newly established Sunday schools or even opening one of their own.

Living in the Appalachian Mountains during The Great Depression

Lifestyle of impoverished families in the Appalachian Mountains during The Great Depression was characteristically distinct. Rural America persevered through extremely low incomes throughout the economic contagion; thought this effect was much more prevalent in industrial cities, it still greatly affected poor communities. It was common to see disease-ridden families struggling to survive in dilapidated shacks across the Appalachian mountains and other Eastern rural areas. “Almost 60 percent of families… fell below the poverty level," forcing lower class Americans to rely on self-sufficiency rather than the little government welfare given.

References

"1878-1899: Religion: Overview." American Eras. Encyclopedia.com. Accessed October 6, 2022. https://www.encyclopedia.com/history/news-wires-white-papers-and-books/1878-1899-religion-overview.

Lobao, Linda, and Katherine Meyer. “The Great Agricultural Transition: Crisis, Change, and Social Consequences of Twentieth Century US Farming.” Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 103–24. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2678616.

O’Hare, Sean. “Valley of poverty: The desperate pictures of rural America that show 1930s-style depression actually lasted until the SIXTIES.” DailyMail.com. Associated Newspapers Ltd. Last modified January 31, 2013. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2271185/Desperate-pictures-rural-America-1930s-style-depression-actually-lasted-SIXTIES.html.

Reynolds, Cerisa, Bryan Kendall, William Whittaker, and Thomas Charlton. “Nineteenth-Century Butchery and Transport for a Market Economy: Plum Grove as a Case Study for Commercial Transactions in the Midwestern USA.” Anthropozoologica 49, no. 1 (June 1, 2014): 47–61. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.5252/az2014n1a04.

State University Madison. 1885. Illustration. Wisconsin's Legislative Reference Bureau. Wisconsin. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/b/b9/Madison_State_University.jpeg/520px-Madison_State_University.jpeg

Sunday school, Indians and white[s]. 1900. Photograph. NARA. Oklahoma. https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/3/3b/Sundayschool1900.jpg/440px-Sundayschool1900.jpg

“The Man Who Lives in the House by the Side of the Road” Interview by Jacques H. Upshaw, date December 1938, Folder 263, Federal Writers’ Project papers #3709, Southern Historical Collection, The Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, https://dc.lib.unc.edu/cdm/singleitem/collection/03709/id/718/rec/1

Trollinger, William Vance. “Riley's Empire: Northwestern Bible School and Fundamentalism in the Upper Midwest.” Church History 57, no. 2 (1988): 197–212. doi:10.2307/3167186.