Eli Lindsey by Nancy Britton (This sketch is based on pre-publication notes made by Nancy Britton, who has been commissioned by the History 2000 Committee to write a new 200-year history of Methodism in Arkansas.)

Elijah Lindsey was born about 1797 in Rutherford County, North Carolina, one of the ten children of James and Rachel Lindsey. About 1804 the family moved to what is now Trigg County, Kentucky, where their names are found on the rolls of the Donelson Creek Baptist Church. Some ten years later the Lindseys moved again, this time to Lawrence County, Missouri Territory (now Arkansas), where they settled on Big Creek, approximately where it flows into Strawberry River. It was here, probably in 1815, that young Eli met William Stevenson, a circuit riding Methodist preacher traveling out of Bellview, Missouri, and began traveling and preaching with him.

Stevenson, with the help of Lindsey and another local preacher named Henry Stephenson, organized the Spring River Circuit that year, reporting to the 1815 Tennessee Conference that it consisted of "88 whites and 4 colored persons." The new circuit was left "to be supplied" by the conference, but it is known that Eli Lindsey preached regularly in the vicinity in 1816, probably on the recommendation of Stevenson. A famous story survives from the memoirs of the Rev. John M. Steele, who got the tale first-hand from Col. Morgan Magness. Lindsey was preaching in a store house at Batesville when the dogs outside started a bear. All the men grabbed their guns, which were stacked near the door, and went in pursuit of the bear. When they returned successfully, Lindsey closed his service with a prayer thanking God for "men who could shoot and women who could pray."

Lindsey spent only one year on the preaching circuit. He located in 1817, giving up the itinerant ministry to return to farming, although he did continue to preach occasionally and to perform marriages for the rest of his life. He was ordained a local deacon as late as 1832. He was married to Sarah Maria Williams, daughter of Benjamin Williams, about 1822, and he appears often in the court papers of Lawrence County, engaging in transactions involving land, livestock and slaves. He was apparently considered a responsible and prosperous young man, for in 1824, he was appointed adjutant of the Lawrence County militia, and he also served as magistrate for Union Township.

Around 1815, the Lindsey family, along with other settlers in the area, organized what became the Flat Creek Methodist church. There are no existing record for the church, but it is believed that the congregation met occasionally in the Lindsey home for services, either in the log dog-trot house, which remained standing for many years, or in a nearby structure built to be a smokehouse. A marker was placed at the approximate site of the Lindsey home in 1954.

In 1827 a large party of people left Lawrence County to move south into what is now Grant County, then a part of Pulaski County. This group, which included the whole Lindsey family - Eli and Sarah, their children, parents, and Eli's brothers Burkitt and Carlton and their families - and probably others, settled in the environs of Nall Lake. Although Eli was no longer a part of the itinerant ministry, he is known to have performed marriages in that neighborhood in 1828 and 1829. In 1830, "Lindsey's home, thirty miles south of Little Rock" was a point on the Arkansas Circuit.

A cholera epidemic in 1831 struck hard at the Lindsey family. Eli's parents, James and Rachel, his brother Carlton and a sister all died within a few days. Three years later Eli Lindsey himself died, of unknown cause, on May 2, 1834, at Fourche LeFave in Conway County, where he had apparently gone to preach. Often referred to as "Old Eli", he was only 37 year old. He left a wife, five sons and a daughter.

Lindsey is probably buried in the Old Tull Cemetery in Grant County. In 1842 his father-in-law had sold a portion of land, excepting in the deed "five rods square whereon lies my graveyard." Most of the graves are unmarked, but oldtimers in the area have told Lindsey descendants that it was always known that Lindsey was buried there.

To young Eli Lindsey, riding through the woods and canebrakes of North Arkansas in 1815, goes the honor of being the first Methodist preacher in Arkansas to hold services regularly while riding an official circuit.

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