Isaac Taylor (1802-1874)

This is part 4 of the paper Betty Hamby West presented to the North Alabama Conference Historical Society.

It was no surprise to me to discover that the middle Taylor brother, the one from whom I am descended, Isaac, was the colorful and controversial character among the three preacher brothers. He was my great- great grandfather. The second child of Isaac Taylor and Hannah Hopper, Louisa, married William Clark. Their daughter, Laura Frances Clark, married George W. Hamby. Their son, Charles P. Hamby, was my father. Louisa Taylor Clark was my great grandmother. She is buried in the Cottondale Nature Gardens Cemetery near Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Isaac Taylor was licensed to preach by the quarterly conference of the Jones Valley Circuit upon a recommendation from the society at Cedar Mountain in 1824. The watershed event of his life occurred about 1832. He then had a wife, Hannah, and six children aged 11 down to a nursing infant. They lived only a couple of miles from the Shiloh church. One night, between bedtime and dawn, his wife disappeared. The mystery caused a sensation in the community, especially among the enemies of Methodism. It was soon whispered about that the Rev. Isaac Taylor had killed his wife. The main evidence against him was the presumption that it was unnatural for a woman to leave her own children. The climax came when some bones that were found in the forest near the Taylor farm were exhibited as bones of the missing woman. Isaac was arrested. However, after all the sensation and excitement, the grand jury never indicted him. He was eventually exonerated, but not before his life and ministry had been damaged (West 289). The theory which solved the mystery was elopement: a man who moved from the Cedar Mountain region to Texas, and who knew Isaac Taylor and his wife intimately, was one day in a Texas store when a man and woman walked in. He immediately recognized the woman as the missing wife of Rev. Taylor and he saw that she recognized him. Without speaking a word, she and the man with her left the store. The story that evolved was that she had left home disguised as a boy with a man who lived near her; that they had gone through obscure regions, using deserted Indian trails, and continued on to the Republic of Texas. This theory was corroborated by the memory of her oldest child of the day of her disappearance. On that day, he and his mother had been dropping com in the field, and they went together to the house for her to nurse the baby. He recalled that as she nursed the infant he saw a sad expression cover his mother's face (290). A final support for this theory was made by Rev. Taylor himself on his death bed. In conversation with one of his friends, in alluding to his credentials, he said: "These papers I have never dishonored. In the pulpit I have never uttered a word which I would rescind" (289).

I have read this account in Anson West several times and tried to imagine the circumstances of Isaac and Hannah's life. Today, with our knowledge of post-partum depression and emotional stress, it is not difficult to believe that a woman with the responsibilities of six small children, all the domestic work, and most of the farm work; a woman with a husband who was off riding the circuit, and rarely there to support her, might choose to escape from it all. This is more easily imagined than that a man would murder a wife and become himself solely responsible for all these duties.

The dark shadow over Isaac's life did not stop his preaching nor totally mar his influence. The epitaph on his headstone, in the Taylor's Chapel cemetery, reads "He was a minister of the gospel 50 years and died in the hope and consolation of the same." In 1990 I interviewed an older first cousin, Rev. Mack Hamby, who has since deceased, and questioned him about the Taylors. Please listen to part of the interview. (See Attachment).

Isaac Taylor married Elizabeth King in 1836, which was four years after the disappearance of his first wife.

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