Our Arklahoma Heritage: "Preacher" Doke made the Methodist circuit from Rogers to Bentonville until his death in 1917

Nathaniel Mattox Doke was born on December 9, 1833, near Terre Haute in Washington County, Indiana, the son of Samuel Doke and Mary Mattox. He grew up in a hardworking family where he and his older brother William earned their keep in a local packing house and tannery before opening a small leather and shoe shop.

William made fine boots while Nathaniel turned out sturdy work shoes. The brothers kept the business running until the Civil War pulled Nathaniel away.

He enlisted in the Union Army and served through the conflict. When peace returned he married Eliza Ellen Baldridge on October 22, 1884, in Seligman, Missouri. She was twenty-three years younger than he was. The couple moved to Benton County in the mid-1880s and bought two hundred acres along the White River in the remote Pine Log community of Garfield Township.

Floods regularly ruined the corn crop, but Doke planted peach and apple orchards, raised cattle, hogs, and a herd of cashmere goats, and kept the family fed.

Long before he arrived in Arkansas, neighbors had started calling him "Preacher'.

He was a self-taught Methodist exhorter who could deliver a sermon with plainspoken fire that filled brush-arbor meetings and log churches. He rode circuits from Rogers to Bentonville, held revivals under the pines, and helped organize the first Methodist congregations in the hill country.

People said he talked from his heels, meaning every word came straight from the heart and carried conviction.

Education mattered as much to him as salvation. The Pine Log children had no school, so Doke felled trees, hewed logs, and built a one-room schoolhouse with his own hands. He planed the benches, bought slates and primers, and taught the first classes himself. The Pine Log School opened in 1889 and ran until 1944, when it merged with the Garfield district.

A master carpenter and blacksmith, he could shoe a horse, repair a wagon, or play a lively tune on his fiddle at a Saturday gathering. In the late 1890s the family moved from the river bottom to higher ground on Garfield Mountain, just east of the new St. Louis-San Francisco Railway tracks, so the younger children could walk to Garfield Elementary.

A 1900 feature in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called him a quaint Arkansan and listed his talents in a single breathless paragraph

Nathaniel and Eliza Ellen raised ten children. William Samuel came first in 1885, followed by Mary, John Baldridge, an infant who lived only days, Sarah Jane, Benjamin Franklin, Nathaniel Junior, another Eliza Ellen, James Reed, and a second infant who died at birth. All were born between 1885 and 1900, most of them in the Pine Log cabin.

Census takers in 1900 and 1910 found the household crowded but orderly, with children helping on the farm and attending the school their father built.

Age and hard work finally slowed him. He lost his hearing in his eighties and walked with a cane. On the afternoon of May 27, 1919, he stepped onto the railway tracks near his home in Garfield. A train struck and killed him instantly.

He was eighty-five years old.

They buried him in Garfield Cemetery, a quiet hillside plot that looks out over the White River valley. His stone is simple: "Nathaniel M. Doke, December 9, 1833 - May 27, 191"9.

Eliza Ellen joined him there in 1943. Several of their children and grandchildren rest in the same ground, keeping company with the pioneers who turned Benton County’s rugged hollows into communities of faith, learning, and honest labor.

Today the Pine Log schoolhouse is gone, but the stories remain. Descendants still farm nearby land, and local historians quote the family chronicle written by grandson E. Reed Doke in the Benton County Pioneer.

A century after his death, Preacher Doke is remembered as the man who brought the Gospel, a classroom, and a good day’s work to the Ozark frontier, one log, one sermon, one child at a time.