C. Russell Christian, a poor country teacher and poet who died at the age of twenty-nine years, authored 151 poems, mostly about his native Logan County, West Virginia. This poem, titled “The Loganite,” was published as part of Mr. Christian’s Rambling Rhymes in 1888.
To live devoid of want and fear;
To dress in jeans when winter comes;
To labor just three months a year,
And spend the nine around our homes.
To sleep two feather beds between,
Whose oaken stead adorns the scene;
If I’ve surveyed the scenes aright,
This is to be a Loganite!
To shoulder up the gun at morn,
And start in quest of deer or bear;
To hunt at night through the fields of corn
To find the ‘coons and ‘possums there;
To chase the boar thru many a ‘scald’
Where long and loud the sengers called–
If I’ve surveyed the scenes aright,
This is to be a Loganite.
To have our friends around the door,
When Sabbath brings the welcome day;
To have no knowledge of the poor
Whom Sunday brings no Sabbath day!
To feast, and laugh, and sing, and chat
And talk of This, and hint at That–
This is the way we took delight,
When I myself a Loganite!
The pawpaws in the wooded dell.
The chestnuts on the mountain top;
The huckleberries, loved so well;
The various fruits–a various crop.
This land is rich in nature’s store,
And fruits that nature always bore,
And all who will, may share the sights.
Presented to the Loganites.
I know there are impressions made
Against the genius of this land;
The homely manners, oft arrayed,
Speak-horror to the great and grand;
But Logan lives at home, the same,
Unmindful of the voice of Fame,
And shares her pleasures and delights,
With her own sons–the Loganites!
The day will come, nor far remote,
When palaces shall take the place
Of hovels that offend the sight,
And lend a proverb to the race;
A glorious future now appears.
The fruit of all our hopes and fears;
And prophecy reveals the sight
Of many a cultured Loganite!
And thou, Guyan! — clear, placid stream,
When future Bards thy beauties sing,
O let them think, as in a dream,
My humble Muse there tried her wing!
I ask no glory but to stand,
In memory of my native land,
And be, when Logan’s name is bright,
Remembered as a Loganite!
Brandon Ray Kirk 