2015 09 24: The Rev. Fred E. Crain told me about some of his ministry, and I wrote down this account. -- Larry Steve Crain, nephew to Uncle Fred
As a child, I, Steve Crain, knew Hubert
and Earl Barton and saw them around the Blue Ridge (upper Greenville County,
S.C.) area. Their farm – theirs and their mother’s – sat only a stone’s throw
from Gum Springs Pentecostal Holiness Church, the church my family attended from
babyhood until I was in my late elementary school years (probably fifth grade).
Turning right out of the church parking
lot, I could look to my left and see the Barton farm. From the road, the
terraced, cultivated acres dropped gradually to woodlands. That landscape was
beautiful. Uncle Fred thinks they might have owned 20 to 30 acres, a typical amount
of land for Southern subsistence farmers. I recall the Barton’s white frame
house and old, unpainted barn. A gray, unpainted, wooden well house, covering
an active well, stood in the yard and was visible from the road. A one-horse
wagon sat in the hallway of the barn.
Fred knew Hubert and Earl in their
youth. He lived not far from them as a young man and was perhaps a year older
than Earl.
“Hubert was probably three or four years
older than Earl,” Fred says. “Earl worked at Taylors Lumber Yard in Taylors for
many years. I think his brother kept on working on the farm. I heard that Earl,
late in life, got into gambling [machines] and gambled away all his money. He’d
get paid and go gamble.”
An Alewine family owned Taylors Lumber
Yard.
“They owned it till they died out,” Fred
says.
Hubert and Earl lived with their mother.
Their father had died.
“The father was gone before I remember
anything,” Fred says. “Guy was the oldest of four boys and one girl born to
Hubert and Earl’s parents. Guy dated a girl and went wild over her, but she
wouldn’t marry him. She might have been leading him on just to have someone to
go somewhere with. When she wouldn’t marry him, he went batty. They took to the
asylum. I don’t think he ever got out.”
The next-oldest Barton brother, as Fred
recollects, was Ralph.
“Ralph went in the army and ‘never came
home,’ as they say,” Fred notes. “He met some girl out in maybe Louisiana and
never brought her home to meet his family. He might have come home once.”
Fred remembers only one girl, Beatrice,
being born to the Barton family.
“She married T.C. Foster,” Fred says.
“They arranged it that she would slip out of her family’s house and start
walking down the road. T.C. came along in his car and got her. There was a
little store where people gathered, down near our house near the creek. When
T.C. and Beatrice passed that store, T.C. yelled out the car window to a few
people standing at the store, ‘I got the gal!’”
Hubert and Earl got into Gum Springs PH
Church a while before they died, Fred says, indicating that the brothers
accepted the Lord.
Fred experienced an interesting
interaction with Hubert while Fred served as an assistant pastor at Faith
Temple Church.
Men would gather and talk in a group at
Ralph Fowler’s general store, then located about a mile and a half below
Mountain View Elementary School on Hwy 253 in Greenville County, S.C.
Fred had heard that those men who
gathered at Ralph’s store had discussed his “going around and trying to win
people to the Lord.”
“I’ll never get saved,” Willie Fowler, a
long-time acquaintance of the Crains, had reportedly said during done of those
discussions.
Hubert Barton reportedly said at one of
those meetings, “If he [Fred] comes to my house, I’ll run him off.”
Fred heard about Hubert’s threat and
drove to Hubert’s house to visit.
“I got out of my car and stood on the
ground,” Fred said. “Hubert came out of his house and pointed at the highway.”
Herbert said to Fred, “You see that
road? Hit it!”
Fred got back into his car and left.
“I guess he went back to the store and
told them what he said to me,” Fred says.
Some time after that, Fred drove by his
mother’s house. As they visited, Lillian Parker Crain, his mother, said, “I
feel like we ought to go up to Willie’s [Willie Fowler].”
Fred drove his mother the short distance
up to Willie and Buenna Fowler’s house.
“The three of us sat in the front room
and talked for about ten minutes,” Fred says. “Then Willie came from another part of the house and stood,
leaning at the door of the room. He looked sort of like he felt he was being
left out. He stood there, talking for about 10 minutes.”
Willie then sat on the couch with Fred,
and Fred asked him, “Wouldn’t you like to accept the Lord, Mr. Fowler?”
“Yes, I would,” Willie said.
“I went through some Scriptures with
him,” Fred says. “The Willie took my hand and went to crying and praying and
shaking me. It was in the early 1980s.”
Willie’s wife, Buenna, was wiping her
eyes, Fred says.
“He had told them at the store that he’d
never be saved,” Fred says. “Willie started coming to church [Faith Temple]
with his wife.”
Ralph Fowler, who owned the store, later
said he “got saved” when listening to Oral Roberts.
Later, Fred passed by a room in the
hospital, and Hubert Barton, whom Fred didn’t see in the room, hollered at him
to come in. Hubert was sitting on a bed and said to Fred, “Come up here and sit
down.”
“He talked as if all was OK, then,” Fred
said. “He’d been going to Gum Springs. They’d both been going to Gum Springs
Church . . . Earl and Hubert.”
Fred used to visit Roy Lynn and try to
win him to the Lord.
“Roy Lynn – you know, I couldn’t do
anything with him at his home,” Fred says. “I visited him several times at
home. He didn’t want to talk about religious stuff. One time, he got out his
big pistol, laid it on the counter, and told about how he used to be a prison
guard.”
Roy became sick and entered a hospital.
“But when he got in the hospital, he was
different,” Fred says. “He called me to come and see him.”
Fred says he and Roy prayed for Roy to
be saved.
“I think it was about six years later
that Roy died,” Fred says.
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