Martin Rice

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A BIOGRAPHY OF MARTIN RICE

Martin Rice, the author of "Rural Rhymes," was the oldest of the seven sons and four daughters of Enoch and Mary Rice, and had his birth and early training in what is now Union County, then a part of Campbell, in East Tennessee, thirty miles north of Knoxville, near the present Lost Creek postoffice.

His father, Enoch, being a farmer of small means, poor health, and a large family, had hard work to make the ends meet, and consequently his boys were (as they ought to have been) brought up to labor on the farm. Martin, however, born on the 22d of November, 1814, was sent to school at a very early age, and when six years old was pronounced the best reader of his age in all the country. But after this, for the want of school facilities or the pressing need of labor on the farm or help to his mother in the house, his schooling was irregular and somewhat neglected, and at the age of fourteen be quit school altogether, having attended school, from the age of five to fourteen, about thirty months, and at that time he says he had never seen the inside of a grammar. The last five months of his schooling in 1828 he studied arithmetic, and at the end of the term had got so far in "Pike" as to geometrical progression.

But though his schooling ended at the age of fourteen, his studies did not. At his request his father bought him Murray's English Grammar, and this he studied without the aid of a teacher; for his father, though a fair backwoods scholar of that day, had never studied grammar himself.

About the same time his taste for writing began to manifest itself, and many a Sunday and rainy day, while other boys were amusing themselves at play, he spent the time in putting his thoughts on paper, both in prose and in rhyme.

In the autumn of 1832 he was employed to teach a district school for five months in Claiborne County, Tennessee, the first ever taught in the district under the first free-school law of the State, for which he was promised ten dollars per month, one-fourth of which he never received, and while teaching this school he paid his board by laboring on mornings, evenings, and Saturday.

The next summer his father sold his small farm for $800, and in the autumn with his family moved to Jackson County, Missouri, and in October, 1833, entered 160 acres of Government land near Lone Jack, a part of the farm on which Martin now resides. On this a cabin was soon built, and the family moved into it in November of the same year, a few days after the great meteoric shower.

Before coming to Missouri his father had traded for a cheap set of surveying instruments and an old treatise on that science, thinking they might be of use in the new country to which he was moving, and the long evenings of that winter were spent by Martin in studying the lessons of that old book, as the days were spent in grubbing hazel and making rails. After assisting in opening and fencing a farm and planting a crop, he was hired to a neighboring farmer for two months at ten dollars per month, to be paid in the fall with pork.

After this in the autumn he taught a short term of school, the second ever taught in what is now Van Buren Township in Jackson County.

In the summer of 1835 he made a crop with an uncle near Independence, sold his crop in the fall, and with the money thus obtained (and some borrowed) entered land near his father's. On this he worked through the winter and sold it in the spring., and then entered land in Cass County (then called Van Buren).

On the 3d day of April, 1836, he was married to Miss Mary Lynch, of Lafayette County, and on the 11th of the same month moved to his lately purchased home and commenced housekeeping, and here he resided as a farmer until the death of his wife in December, 1855. His father having died in 1851, he sold out in Cass and.bought the old homestead in 1856, where he still is.

When he married and settled in Cass, or Van Buren, it was a county but recently organized and thinly settled. The first general election was held soon after, and he was elected county surveyor, an office of no profit, which he held for three years.

Politically, he has generally been in the minority, State and county, and in consequence has not sought or held office, adopting the motto of Henry clay, "Rather to be right than in office and wrong.

In 1846, he was chosen as justice of the peace and served four years, and the title of "Squire" sticks to him yet.

In addition to his occupation as a farmer, he was engaged as a nurseryman, propagating fruit trees from 1849 to 1881.Large numbers of the orchards of Jackson, Johnson, Lafayette, and Cass counties were grafted by the same hand that wrote the "RURAL RHYMES"; and he has often been heard to say that after he is dead and gone those orchards will remain to benefit the rising generations.

During his labors on the farm for so many years he has found time to cultivate the mind as well as the soil and to pursue his studies, mathematics being his favorite one, in which he is said now to surpass many collegiate professors. Some things he claims to have discovered in mathematics not known before, or at least not laid down in. the books. As has been said, he commenced writing poetry or rhyming at the age of fourteen. None of his youthful effusions have been preserved. From 1850 to 1876 occasional pieces were published in the county papers over the signature of "Phocion"and other noms ae plume, and in 1877 his "RURAL RHYMES AND POEMS FROM THE FARM" was published at the office of Ramsey, Millett & Hudson. That edition of 1500, and another of 2000 published later, have all been disposed of years ago, mostly in Jackson and adjoining counties, but many copies have found their way to other States, and have been highly appreciated there as well as at home.

Of Mr. Rice's six brothers and four sisters, all younger than he, only one brother and one sister are living: Henry H. Rice, at Manhattan, Kansas, and Louisa J. Snow, in Johnson County, Missouri. His oldest brother, David, one of the early merchants of Cass County, who died on the way to California in 1849, is referred to in his poem "Twenty Years Past," and his youngest brother, Pryor, who fell at Corinth in 1863, is supposed to be "The Soldier from the Kansas Line." His mother, who after 1856 made her home with him, died in March, 1881.

Of his four sons and five daughters, three of each are still living. His oldest son and second daughter died in infancy. His oldest daughter, Martha J. Tate, died in 1869, and her dying charge to her son, who is now a minister of the gospel at Sarcoxie, Missouri, is one of the author's poems. His son Isaac L., lives in the southwestern part of Cass County, and his son Alvin B., in the northeastern corner of the same county; his youngest son, Marion, in Colorado. His oldest living daughter, Mary, with her husband, William L. Butler, and family, live with him and manage the farm on which his father settled, as has been said, in 1833. His daughter Nancy Mitchell lives near Norwood, in Wright County, Missouri, and his youngest, Elvira Mitchell, in Montana.

Martin Rice is emphatically an old-fashioned farmer of the old-fashioned school, one who sometimes doubts whether the modern way of running things by steam is much better than running them in the old-fashioned manner. He united with the Baptist Church at Pleasant Garden near Lone Jack, in 1841, and afterward transferred his membership to the Lone Jack Church of Missionary Baptists, of which church he is still a member, and the one of longest standing in the body.

As may be inferred from some of his poems, he was during the great civil war a steadfast friend of the Union, being then, as ever before, in a minority; but he managed to keep at home and on Rice Mill in Union County Tennessee good terms with his neighbors who differed in opinion with him, frequently assisting and befriending them in their troubles, and being assisted and befriended by them in return. The biographical sketch and photograph are from the third edition of Rural Rhymes, and Talks and Tales of Olden Times: by Martin Rice, the original published in Kansas City in 1893. "The Fall of That Old Mill," published in Volume 9, No 2, June 1990 Pathways, was written by Rice to William Sharp, a schoolmate, following a visit to the homeplace in 1874 after forty years. The old mill built by James Rice in 1798 and depicted by Martin Rice, was removed from the Norris Dam basin (Lost Creek area of Union County) in the 1930s by the Civilian Conservation Corps and rebuilt near the dam site (See photo left). See photograph of Rice Mill in Vol 9 No. 2 of Pathways.

For more information on this article or any article or publication of the Union County Historical Society please write them at:

Union County Historical Society
P.O. Box 95
Maynardville, TN 37807

Or
E-mail the Union County Historical Society.

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