Our Arklahoma Heritage: A Tennessee-born Confederate officer and lawyer took his gospel teachings around the world
In the Ozark hills of Eureka Springs, Arkansas, a limestone house rises with the look of a European fortress, its balcony facing east and its parlor windows glowing with religious scenes in colored glass.
Locals and visitors still call the place Penn Castle, and the story behind its walls reaches back through a career that took a Tennessee farm boy, a Confederate officeer, and a Texas lawyer into pulpits across the South, the Midwest, and even the British Isles.
The man who built it was the son of George Douglas Penn and Telitha Patterson. His father came from a Virginia line that settled in Middle Tennessee, and the family farmed near the village of Old Jefferson in Rutherford County. When the boy was still small the household moved into Gibson County, then later to the Lexington area.
Farm work filled his early years. He began school at age ten, attended a term at the Male Academy in Trenton, and spent another term at Union University in Murfreesboro. He read law in the office of Williams and Wright, was admitted to the bar, and at about twenty opened his own practice in Lexington.
In the fall of 1847 he went to a camp meeting at Bluff Springs mainly for the company of other young people. Conviction struck him there, and he was converted. He joined Beachgrove Baptist Church and was baptized. His singing voice, a powerful bass, soon made him useful to preachers. On April 30, 1856, he married Corrilla Frances Sayle. The couple adopted two girls and a boy. One of the girls died in childhood. Census records later list the children as Elton, Maggie, and Clyde.
When the Civil War came he served in Andrew N. Wilson’s Regiment of the Sixteenth Tennessee Cavalry. Captured in Hardeman County in February 1864, he spent more than a year as a prisoner before an exchange in April 1865. Promoted to major, he signed his parole at Shreveport in June of that year and was known as Major Penn for the rest of his life. In January 1866 the family moved to Jefferson, Texas, where he reopened a law office.
The war had left him with little money, yet within weeks he handled a case that paid in gold and his practice thrived again.
In Jefferson he threw himself into Baptist work. He became Sunday school superintendent, growing the class through small incentives and regular gatherings. He served as president of the Texas Baptist Sunday School and Colportage Convention in 1873 and 1874. At a Sunday school institute in Tyler in July 1875 the local pastor, James H. Stribling, asked him to speak. Crowds gathered for five weeks. Many were converted.
Stribling and others pressed him to leave the law and give himself fully to evangelism. Licensed by the Jefferson church in 1877 and ordained at Broadway Baptist Church in Galveston on December 4, 1880, he became the first Baptist in Texas to devote his entire time to itinerant preaching.
Over the next two decades he held meetings in thirteen states and crossed the Atlantic for campaigns in England and Scotland. Estimates of public professions under his preaching run as high as fifty thousand, most of them joining Baptist churches. One convert, a young telegraph messenger named Edgar Young Mullins, later led Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and the Southern Baptist Convention.
Penn preached in churches, warehouses, brush arbors, and large camp meetings that drew five or six thousand people. He bought a tent for $500 so weather would not stop the work.
Music was central. He compiled the Harvest Bells hymnals with associates, insisted on their use in his meetings, and wrote both words and tunes. His best known hymn, “The Sheltering Rock,”
begins “There is a Rock in a weary land” and asks “Then why will ye die?” Portable reed organs traveled with him and helped introduce instruments to many Texas congregations.
Disappointment over the way state leaders treated a church building project in Palestine, the so-called Nickel Church funded by small gifts, led him to leave Texas. Around 1887 he and Corrilla moved to Eureka Springs.
European castles he had seen on preaching tours, including those at Nottingham and Hucknall, shaped the house he began in 1888.
Four rear rooms went up first as a simple cottage. As money came in he added the three story front of limestone in Second Empire style, complete with ornate millwork, carved mantels, and Tiffany style stained glass that illustrated his call to the ministry.
The couple eventually acquired the mountaintop property running down toward the site of the church later named in his honor. Penn Memorial Baptist Church was built in 1912.
The house itself later passed through other hands, including those of Gerald L. K. Smith, and appeared on the HGTV program If Walls Could Talk.
Health began to fail in 1892. His weight dropped from about 240 pounds to 170. He finished the autobiographical portion of The Life and Labors of Major W. E. Penn that year, though the book appeared only after his death. On April 29, 1895, he died at home in the castle. A large funeral followed on May 1.
The pastor read from Psalm 126 the words about going forth with precious seed and returning with sheaves. He was buried in the Eureka Springs Cemetery, also known as the Odd Fellows or IOOF Cemetery. Corrilla survived him until September 23, 1917, and was laid beside him.
The castle still stands on Eureka Street, a reminder of the lawyer who became the Texas Evangelist and of the hymn that still points travelers toward shelter in a weary land.
