The Gospel Ranger's unsolved mystery

by Jack Neely

Exactly what Lorenzo Dow witnessed here 195 years ago this month is something we'll never know about for certain. He came because he'd heard bizarre tales about an extraordinary phenomenon that appeared to be concentrated in the small city of Knoxville.

"I had heard about a singularity called the JERKS...which appeared first near Knoxville in August last, to the great alarm of the people; which reports I first considered as vague and false. But at length, like the Queen of Sheba, I set out to go and see for myself...."

In 1804, Dow was a young, longhaired Methodist missionary from Connecticut sometimes known as Crazy Dow. Even as a teenager he'd tried to become a Methodist missionary, but had been repeatedly rejected, allegedly due to the "peculiarity of his character." When he was a child, he said, the prophet Nathan appeared to him in a dream and told him he would die at the age of "two and twenty." Skeletal and asthmatic, Dow found the prediction easy to believe. He worked to pack as much into his short life as he could. With no time to lose, he traveled: New England, Canada, the British Isles, preaching his version of the Word. He introduced Protestantism to Louisiana. Later admirers would call him the Gospel Ranger.

When Lorenzo Dow rode a lame horse into East Tennessee, he was 26 years old. He'd broken Nathan's deadline, but he still wasn't taking a day for granted. Finally rejected by church authorities, Dow came to the South as a freelance Methodist.

No one called the South a Bible Belt in 1804. The northeastern religious intelligentsia regarded the eight-year-old state of Tennessee as backward and ungodly. Knoxville itself was 12 years old, a booming capital city with over 200 buildings—none of which was a church. There were pockets of religious people here and there: a Presbyterian club in town, Methodists in the countryside, groups of Quakers in Blount County. But on the whole, the South—especially this trans-Appalachian moral wasteland called Tennessee—struck northerners as a dangerous, heathen place, desperately in need of missionaries, crazy or not.

After saving portions of North Carolina in early 1804, Dow made his way west. Uncharmed by the leafless Smokies in wintertime, he'd crossed what he called "the dismal Allegheny Mountains" on Valentine's Day.

A less determined evangelist might have turned back. On the road to Knoxville, Dow wrote in his diary, "Solitary shrieks were heard in these woods," which Dow's guide told him were "the cries of murdered persons...." Maybe the guide suspected it was wildcats and was just messing with Brother Dow—but then again, murdered persons were just as common hereabouts as wildcats.

At Maryville, Dow spoke to an enormous crowd of 1,500. That evening, he was sitting at the table with a Quaker family. They'd heard of the jerks, but some Quakers believed they were immune because "we are a still, peaceful people, wherefore we do not have them."

"Whilst at tea I observed [his host's] daughter (who sat opposite to me at the table) to have the jerks..." She "dropped her teacup from her hand in the violent agitation.

"I said to her, 'Lady, what is the matter?'

"She replied, 'I have got the jerks.'

"I asked her how long she had had it.

"She observed, 'a few days.' " The young woman added that the jerks were a disciplinary action from God.

Later, Dow seemed to take some satisfaction in noticing a dozen Quakers with "the jerks as keen and as powerful as any I had seen, so as to have occasioned a kind of grunt or groan when they would jerk." The next day he hitchhiked into Knoxville with a wagonload of folks who told him they were going to town "to hear a crazy man preach."

On Sunday, Feb. 19, 1804, hundreds—too many to be contained in the Knox County courthouse—waited for the crazy man. Governor Sevier was in town on business, and so was his grandson Elbert, who recalled the memorable day many years later.

Before Dow's arrival, Elbert said, the restless, unfocused crowd "moved and surged from side to side..." looking for a crazy preacher. Suddenly, "a tall, plainly dressed man, with a handkerchief about his head in lieu of a hat, appeared as if he had come out of the ground, or had been let down from the clouds." Dow mounted a log and began singing a hymn: "Come, Sinners, To the Gospel Feast...."

Within earshot of Presbyterians, Dow launched into an anti-Calvinist polemic, addressing one man in particular, repeatedly pointing to him and saying, "It is a fact and you can't deny it!" (They say he pronounced his vowels in the "Italian" way: It is a foct and you con't deny it!")

Dow found Knoxville to be as crazy as he was. Surveying his audience, Dow observed the nation's greatest concentration of jerkers. "About 150 appeared to have jerking exercise," remarked Dow, "among whom was a circuit preacher who had opposed them a little before, but he now had them powerfully." That jerking preacher, Dow remarked, "would have fallen over three times" had not the tight crowd kept him upright.

Sevier recalled that when Dow finished his sermon, "without a word of greeting," he "was gone like some wild bird in flight."

Dow never solved the mystery that brought him to Knoxville, but he developed a theory. Today jerkers might be mistaken for holy rollers, helplessly enraptured with the spirit. Dow's impression was much the opposite. "The lukewarm, lazy, half-hearted, indolent" believers were afflicted, he observed. But the "most pious...are rarely touched with it."

Dow concluded that God had cursed Knoxville with the jerks "as a sign of the times, partly in judgment for the people's unbelief."