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CHAPTER XXIX.

SOME FORMER RESIDENTS OF SHELBY COUNTY AND THEIR ACHIEVEMENTS. (CONT'D)

REV. P. C. NELSON.


Rev. P. C. Nelson, linguist and evangelist, was born at Ellits Hoi, Denmark, January 28, 1868, and arrived with his parents at Avoca, Iowa, on August 2, 1872. The family first made their home in a cave in Cuppy's Grove just south of the place owned by Peter Hansen. Later the family removed to another cave in a hill just west of the place of Peter Jensen. Many a night were they awakened by the howling of wolves digging into the roof of the cave. They next lived in a little house built just west of Cuppy's bridge over the Nishnaholna river. This house was afterwards moved across that stream and later enlarged and became the permanent home of this family, which suffered much from poverty and adversity, the father dying by accident July 16, 1879, and other misfortunes following in quick succession. This was the home of T. K. Nelson, an inventive genius of whom Harlan has reason to be proud, organizer and president of the Nelson Gas Engine and Automobile Company; of Mrs. W. H. Adkins, of Minneapolis, wife of a noted violin maker and mother of a family gifted as professional musicians, and of Rev. P. C. Nelson (Christopher), now known all over this country as a linguist and evangelist.

Mr. Nelson, in the summer of 1882, herded cattle for "Bill" Moore on a ranch eight miles west of Audubon. At the age of sixteen he was apprenticed to Cass & McArthur, of Harlan, to learn carriage and sign painting, the firm at that time doing a large business as manufacturers of buggies, carriages, wagons and all kinds of farm machinery. It was during this apprenticeship that Mr. Nelson became interested in education, in telegraphy, and later in religious matters. He went rapidly through the grades of the Harlan schools and then taught a term of school in the school house known as the Brown school, fourteen miles southeast of Harlan. In June, 1889, he preached his first sermon in the Trotter school house, five miles southeast of Harlan, and in the same summer preached several times in Cuppy's Grove, Bowman's Grove and Harlan, then going to the Baptist Seminary at Chicago. From Chicago in 1890 he went to Denison University, Granville, Ohio, receiving the degree of Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Philosophy in 1897. In 1902 he graduated from the Rochester Theological Seminary at Rochester, New York. As a student he especially distinguished himself in the languages, acquiring a good knowledge of Latin, Greek, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Hehrew, Aramaic, the Scandinavian languages, and others. He has a reading knowledge of twenty-five languages and can conduct religious services in several of them. While at Rochester he was translator for the Vick Seed Company, which all pioneers of Shelby county will remember and which at that time did a large business necessitating the use of fifteen foreign languages. He was tutor in Latin and Greek at Denison University and conducted a school of modern languages in one of the New York universities. For a number of years he took regularly more than a dozen foreign perodicals, receiving these in exchange for a paper in which he conducted the department of missions.

June 16, 1895, Mr. Nelson married Miss Myrtle Emma Garmong, a classmate, who afterwards attended Shepardson College at Granville, Ohio. Their daughter, May, has traveled with her father and is assistant as pianist in some of their big union meetings. Their eldest son. Merrill, is a student for the ministry.

Mr. Nelson has been pastor of Baptist churches in Iowa. Ohio and Pennsylvania. He has given nearly eleven years to evangelistic work, in which he has been conspicuously successful in many of the widely separated states of the Union. During the summer he uses a large chautauqua tent with a seating capacity of one thousand five hundred. In the colder months he uses specially constructed tabernacles, opera houses and other large buildings. His sermons are published far and wide, and he enjoys intimate ac- quaintance with thousands of the leading men in different walks of life all over the United States, tie ascribes his remarkable achievements to the grace of God and the grace of hard, incessant toil. It seems almost outside the realm of possibility that two Shelby county boys, at one time classmates in the Harlan public schools and for years making their homes within a block of each other, should become joined in a great life work, such as spreading the gospel to the multitudes by preaching and singing. And yet this has come to pass in the remarkable careers of Evangelist P. C. Nelson and Professor Garmong.


Transcribed by Cheryl Siebrass, October, 2023 from the Past and Present of Shelby County, Iowa, by Edward S. White, P.A., LL. B.,Volume 1, Indianapolis: B. F. Bowen & Co., 1915, pg. 549-550.


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