Hob Thorne

Spouse of Rebecca Bowen Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from the House of Thorne.

Hob Thorne was born in 1787 in the Ohio River landing then called Limestone, later Maysville, Kentucky, and he spent twenty-five years as a circuit preacher on the horseback roads of the western country. He belonged to the House of Thorne by blood and to the Proctor line of the White Ledger by marriage, and he was, in the family's phrase, the only Thorne who ever gave a sermon instead of an ambush. He married the midwife Rebecca Bowen Proctor in 1813, raised two daughters and died in 1839, aged fifty-two, of a fall from a horse on a wet ridge road, a death that the Kentucky Methodists considered almost too appropriate. His father, Ranald Thorne, was born in 1765 and lived until 1843. He was a printer, a steady, ink-stained man of the Thorne family's Kentucky branch who had turned his back on the border tradition of the hunt and taken up the trade of words. The Thornes were by origin border reivers of the Northumbrian marches, cattle raiders who had turned, over the generations, to hunting vampires in the hills, and their descendants in the Appalachians and the Kentucky knobs kept up the old skills of the watch tower and the hound. Ranald was the exception, and he made it clear to his son that there was more than one way to fight the dark. He ran a small press at Limestone, where the boats landed their freight for the road to Lexington, and printed hymn books, land deeds, handbills and the first newspaper in the district. Limestone in the year of Hob's birth was a raw river landing at the mouth of a creek, a place of a few dozen cabins, a warehouse and a ferry, where flatboats from Pittsburgh tied up and the emigrants for the interior climbed a steep, muddy road up the bluff. It was founded the year he was born, on the land of a Virginia speculator, and within a decade it was the busiest landing on the upper Ohio. A boy who grew up there saw everyone. He saw families from Virginia and Maryland with wagons and cows, Scots-Irish Presbyterians, Germans, Quakers, former soldiers with land warrants and a steady traffic of preachers of every persuasion, who were drawn to the western country by the same conviction as the settlers, that it was a place of opportunity and danger. The preaching seized him early. At fourteen, in the summer of 1801, he went with his father to the great camp meeting at Cane Ridge, in Bourbon County, where some twenty thousand people gathered for a week of preaching, singing, weeping and what contemporaries called the exercises, people falling to the ground in ecstasy or shaking in fits. It was the largest religious gathering the frontier had seen. Hob, who was standing in the crowd with his hat in his hands, heard a Methodist preacher talk for an hour about the darkness that lay in every human heart and the light that could be found by those who sought it, and came away in a daze. He told his father that he meant to be a preacher. His father, who was a Presbyterian of a cautious turn, said that there were worse things. He was taken on by the Methodists as an exhorter at eighteen and as a circuit rider at twenty. A circuit preacher in those years was a horseman who travelled a fixed round of settlements, preaching at each in turn, typically a circuit of two hundred miles or more that took four to six weeks to ride. He carried a Bible, a hymnbook, a change of linen and a pair of saddlebags, slept in cabins, preached in barns, groves and courthouses, baptised, married and buried, and received, in return, a salary of eighty dollars a year, when it was paid. Hob rode the Kentucky circuits, from the Ohio to the Licking and the Kentucky River, and he was good at it. He was a big, dark, rough-handed man with a fine baritone voice and a knack for plain speech, and the settlers liked him. The Thorne skills, which he had from his grandfather, were useful on the road. He knew how to read a trail, how to bed down in the open, how to hold a nervous horse, how to make a fire in the rain. More than that, he knew what to look for when a settler said that something was wrong. A circuit rider was the nearest thing that the western country had to a travelling inspector, and he heard about every odd event in every settlement on his round, and he began to pass what he heard to the Thorne and Proctor hunters of the region. More than one vampire was tracked down through Hob's saddlebag, and he was careful to keep it, as he said, in the category of pastoral care. He met Rebecca Bowen Proctor in 1812, on a preaching tour in the Shenandoah Valley that took him east across the mountains. She was twenty, a midwife, the younger daughter of the boatman Samuel Bowen and the laundress Hannah Cutler Proctor, and she sat in the fourth row of a Methodist meeting in a barn near Winchester with a bag at her feet, ready to go out if she was needed. She was called out in the middle of the sermon, and he was told later that it was for the birth of twins. He found out where she lived, rode over the next day and asked whether the babies were well. They were married in 1813, in the valley, and she moved to Kentucky. Their daughter Hannah Proctor was born in 1815 and lived until 1873. Their daughter Minnie Proctor Thorne was born in 1816 and lived until 1887. Neither was a hunter, though both grew up knowing the trade. Rebecca practised midwifery in the settlements of the circuit, travelling with the girls in a covered wagon when Hob was home and staying in the parsonage at Lexington when he was not. She was, in her husband's words, the best preacher in the family, though she never stood in a pulpit. He was on the road during the War of 1812, in the spring of which he rode to the camp of the Kentucky volunteers at Georgetown to conduct a service, and was astonished to find a third of the men on their knees. He preached at funerals, at weddings and at the great revivals of the 1820s, and he died in 1839 on a wet ridge road in the Kentucky hills, when his horse slipped on the clay and rolled over him. He was found by a farmer the next morning, with his Bible in his coat. Hob Thorne is remembered as the preaching Thorne, the circuit rider who carried the hunters' news in his saddlebag. In the Slayerverse he stands for the odd crossing of the faith and the hunt that the frontier produced, in which a man could keep the Lord's word and the White Ledger's watch in the same coat.