[I have to read so much anti-Mormon rancor in my work that I’m a real sucker for any kind word someone had for us in the 19th century.

Thomas J. Berry, born at Lee Valley, Hawkins Co., Tennessee, in 1844, was a farmer and sometime Justice of the Peace. He married Cornelia Trent in 1881, and they became the parents of at least three children, one of whom, George Leonard, a free-thinker like his father, was a labor activist in the pressmen’s and railroad workers’ unions, served with the rank of major in World War I, was appointed by Woodrow Wilson as a member of the American Commission negotiating the peace treaty at the end of that war, and was appointed by Tennessee’s governor to serve out the term of a senator who died in office. Continue reading A Good Word for the Elders, 1884 →