In the summer of '04 our family took a vacation in the Smokey Mountains of Tennesse. As a souvenir, we bought a book called, " The story of Gatlinburg". Gatlinburg is a small town but a large tourist attraction. This book tells a little about it's first settlers and their way of life. The area was then called White Oak Flats. Dad pulled it off the shelf the other day and read some parts aloud. I thought this story was worth passing on :)
"Few in those days were greatly concerned about the fashion of shoes or clothes. In the story of his youth--related to the writer by Mitchell McCarter, a Baptist clergyman who was born in White Oak Flats, educated himself and fitted himself for the ministry almost unaided--he spoke of his sparse wearing apparel. Until he was seventeen years of age, he said, he never had at one time more than the one suit of blue jeans in which he stood, for his mother was left with a family of small children to rear, and was as poor as poverty.
When he was seventeen he was converted at a religious revival in the White Oak Flats Baptist Church, and soundly converted, with the conviction that he was called to preach. He could neither read nor write at this time, for his help had been needed on his mother's farm and she could never spare him to go to school. So earnest was his desire to become a preacher, however, that the elders examined him. They conceded his religious qualifications, but refused to let him enter the ulpit because of his lack of the proper clothing--the long-tailed black coat and long trousers that ministers always wore.
His grandmother took pity on him and presented him with a calf, telling him he might sell it for enough to buy the clothes he wanted. But he got only enough money from the sale of the calf to get a coat--a "Prince Albert"--and that at secondhand and many times too large for him.
Again his good grandmother came to his rescue and promised to make a pair of trousers for him out of old linsey-woolsey skirt of her own. She cut and made one leg, but when she came to the other one, she found she had not enough material to make the second leg as long as the first one. There was no help for it now! she finished the trousers as well as she could, but when he put them on he found that one leg came down to his ankle, the other struck him about half way between the ankle and the knee.
But he was given a trial, and at the age of eighteen the unlettered boy entered the pulpit and preached his first sermon from a text an uncle had repeated to him until he remembered it. And on the strength of that sermon, he received his license as a preacher.
Not long afterward, he said, when he had gone out into the world and seen how other people dressed, did he realize how grotesque he must have looked in those clothes--a long black coat with tails away below his knees and a pair of butternut colored trousers with legs of differing lengths."