Amos Wheeler

Spouse of Rachel Goodwin Faulkner, married into the Faulkner (Lancastrian) line from a local family.

Amos Wheeler was born in 1792 in Newbury, Massachusetts, and spent thirty years as a Methodist circuit preacher in the hill towns of New England. He married the herbalist Rachel Goodwin Faulkner in 1813, raised two sons with her, Arthur and James, and died in 1847, aged fifty-five, in a fall from a horse on a wet hillside road. He was not a hunter and belonged to no family of hunters, but he married into the Faulkner line and gave the Red Ledger, for thirty years, something it badly needed: a respectable man who travelled everywhere, stayed in everybody's house and asked nothing. Newbury, at the mouth of the Merrimack, was one of the oldest towns in Massachusetts, settled in 1635, and it had the stern, tidy, slightly weathered look of a place that had been saying its prayers for a long time. Its farms ran down to the salt marshes, its shipyards built ships for the coasting trade, and its meeting house, the one built in 1792, the year of Amos's birth, was the largest building in the parish. The family papers do not name his parents, and record only that he was the son of a Newbury farmer and a mother who read her Bible aloud at table. The same town had produced, eleven years earlier, the schoolteacher Hannah Dunlap, who would marry into the Faulkner family, and the two were known to each other as children, in the way of a small place, though neither could later say when they had first met. He was converted at sixteen. The Methodists had come to New England in the 1790s with their itinerant preachers, their camp meetings and their gospel of personal experience, and they were a scandal to the established Congregational clergy, who regarded them as ranters. The young Amos, hearing a circuit rider in a barn in the next parish, felt a conviction that overturned his plans. He had been meant for a farm. He went home, told his father that he had been called to preach, and was told that he had better think again. He did not. Within a year he was an exhorter, speaking at prayer meetings, and at nineteen he was admitted on trial to the New England Conference. A circuit preacher's life was built on horseback. Amos was assigned to a circuit, a round of twenty or thirty preaching places scattered over a district, and he was expected to ride it every three or four weeks, preaching at each stop, meeting the classes, baptising, marrying, burying and collecting the quarterly dues. He rode a circuit in the hills of central Massachusetts that took in Worcester, Leicester, Spencer and Brookfield, and he covered some two thousand miles a year. He slept where he was put, in farmhouses, taverns and sometimes in barns, ate what was set before him and preached wherever a dozen people would gather. He was paid a hundred dollars a year, in principle. He was a tall, earnest, red-haired young man with a good tenor voice and a habit of looking at the ceiling when he was thinking, and he was popular on the circuit. His preaching was plain and warm. He liked to tell stories, he liked a good hymn, and he never spoke for more than half an hour, a virtue that made him welcome at farms where the haying was waiting. He also had an eye for the household, and he was a good listener, and in the course of his circuit he heard a great deal. In the spring of 1813 he met Rachel Goodwin Faulkner. She was twenty-two, a herbalist from a Salem family who had gone to Worcester to sell a salve for his cough at the request of her mother, and she found him after a meeting in a barn, hoarse and dripping, and handed him a small pot. He asked what was in it. She said that she would tell him once he had stopped coughing. The salve worked, and they were married in the year's end, in Worcester, at the Faulkner family's church. She moved into the itinerant life with him, in a covered gig with a medicine chest under the seat, and they travelled the circuit together. Amos learned about the Red Ledger from his brother-in-law, Ezekiel Faulkner, in 1815, on a visit to Salem, when Ezekiel, who was home on leave from the river, came in late one night with a torn sleeve and could not account for it. He told Amos the truth, in the Goodwin kitchen, over a pot of tea. Amos listened to the end. He said, after a long silence, that he had seen a good deal of the dark in his years on the road, and that he had often wondered who was keeping the watch. From that night he considered himself a member of the family's company, though he never carried a gun and never claimed a tally. His usefulness was practical. A circuit preacher was the most natural of travellers. He went everywhere, he was known in every village, and he was welcomed in the houses of the respectable and the disreputable alike. He heard the news of the hills, the sick cow, the strange visitor, the family that had left in the night, the child who would not leave the house after dusk, and he passed it on to the Faulkner hunters in a letter or a word. His sermons, which were always on the subject of watchfulness, were said by the hunters to be the best they had heard. More than one vampire was tracked down through a pastoral visit. Their sons were born on the road. Arthur Faulkner was born in 1815 and lived until 1873, and kept his mother's name by the family custom and took up his grandfather Silas Goodwin's trade of wheelwright. James Faulkner Wheeler was born in 1818 and lived until 1863, and served as a chaplain with a Massachusetts regiment in the Civil War, dying in 1863 in a fall from his horse, as his father had. Neither was a hunter, but both carried their father's habit of looking at the ceiling, and James carried it into the pulpit. Amos worked the circuit until the middle of the 1840s, when his knees began to give out, and then took a station at a town on the Connecticut. He died in 1847, at fifty-five, in a fall from his horse on a wet hillside road on the way to a funeral. His wife Rachel, who survived him by twenty-two years, found his Bible in the saddlebag, with a pressed leaf of yarrow at the ninety-first Psalm. Amos Wheeler is remembered as the preaching husband of the herbalist of Worcester. In the Slayerverse he stands for the circuit riders, the itinerant ministers who carried a hunting family's news across the hills.