REV. NATHANIEL WALLER PRIDGEON
The Minister Who Preached His Own Funeral
Yogi Berra, baseball legend and human philosopher, once said, “Always go to other people’s funerals, otherwise they won’t go to yours.” Rev. Nathaniel Waller Pridgeon, a former resident of Laurens County, did not subscribe to that theory. He went to his own funeral. He preached it, but in the end, he wasn’t there when the last shovel of dirt was thrown on top of his coffin.
Nathaniel Waller Pridgeon was born in Montgomery County, North Carolina, on April 9, 1804. Pridgeon’s family moved to Baldwin County, the seat of Georgia’s capital, in 1808. Pridgeon’s father was known to have been a mechanic and somewhat of a squatter. The family moved around from place to place looking for work. Nathaniel Pridgeon graduated from medical college and began his practice of medicine in Laurens County. Almost from the start of practice, Nathaniel began to have doubts about his future as a physician.
"You know I was a doctor then - a regular medicine doctor - and I cured folks all over Laurens County. I made up my mind I would go to farming, and quit practicing altogether, but do you know them folks just wouldn't let me do it. I would be plowing in the fields, and here would come somebody running to fetch me to see some ailing body, and of course, I had to go. Yes, they just kept coming and I could not make them stop. It was doctor this, and doctor that, doctor morning, evening and night. I knew if i stayed in old Laurens, I never could quit practicing, so I just pulled up stakes and lit out for Alabama,” said Dr. Pridgeon. "I know it wasn't right. It wasn't Christian-like. I ought to have stayed and physiced those people, cause it seemed like God's will. That worried me for four years, and at last I couldn't stand it, and I just left there and came right back to Georgia," Pridgeon regretfully told an Atlanta Constitution reporter. Pridgeon was proud of the fact that he had lived in eleven states during his life. He primarily lived in Morgan, Oconee, Clarke, and Laurens counties in Georgia and spent a short time in Alabama. “Well, I felt that God called me to new fields and new pastures, and I obeyed His call. I disobeyed Him once, and that was when I went over to Alabama,” Pridgeon said.
Dr. Pridgeon came back to Georgia and settled in Morgan County. Pridgeon attended a church service in Oconee County. Pridgeon was so moved by the sermon that day that he was converted and baptized. Dr. Pridgeon became Rev. Pridgeon when he was ordained as a minister in 1845. Rev. Pridgeon moved to Oconee County, where he made a good living of five silver dollars a month, much more than he needed.
Rev. Pridgeon married Polly Willoughby, daughter of William Willoughby, on December 12, 1824, in Athens. One of their seven children, Alva Carter Pridgeon, married Eliza Gilleland, whose father, John Gilleland, developed the famed “double-barrel” cannon of Athens, Georgia. Gilleland designed his cannon to shoot two cannon balls connected by a long chain. Gilleland theorized that the balls and the chain would create big gaps in Union army lines. The invention never worked as it was intended to do. The two cannonballs would never come out together. The first time it was fired, one ball left first and the second spun around killing a cow and knocking down a barn. It was used again when the Yankees tried to enter Athens, but the barrels were loaded with buckshot..
It was a bright day in the early spring on April 7, 1888, two days before Rev. Pridgeon’s eighty-fourth birthday. The crowd began to gather early in Oconee County. Rev. Pridgeon was going to preach at his own funeral. At eleven o’clock in the morning, the service began. Nearly twenty-three hundred curious onlookers crowded around the pulpit and the coffin. Rev. Pridgeon invited a newspaper reporter to have an exclusive seat on top of his coffin. Pridgeon had studied the “Bible” and had determined that funerals were the results of pagan worship. His first wife had died a few years earlier. She had no funeral. His first memory of a funeral was that of his father, more than a half-century earlier, in which his father was buried with full Masonic honors. The Reverend denounced the evils of money and liquor. He challenged the crowd not to revel in the death of friends and loved ones.
The Reverend began to sing. He told the audience that he was going to Heaven. He invited all of those who would listen to come with him to Christ and to serve God. The last words of his sermon were “Ye pearly gates, fly open wide, make ready to receive the bride. Hark and hear the herald’s cry! Be heard, the bridegroom’s growing nigh!” Pridgeon closed his eyes, stroked his beard, and looked at his memo book. The funeral sermon was over.
The choir sang “Beulah Land.” The reporter and a couple of gentlemen passed hats throughout the crowd as an offering for the beloved minister. Rev. Pridgeon was grateful. He had been wealthy in the past, but the last years had taken a toll on his finances. The donations would allow him to spend his last days without want or need of money.
Mrs. Pridgeon adamantly refused to allow the coffin to be taken back home. It was stored at a neighbor’s office until the time came for the burial of her husband. The newspaper reported touchingly described his last encounter with the man whom he had grown to admire; “ I left him standing so with the parting words still on his trembling lips, and his dull eyes still on the somber casket. When I turned to look again he was yet standing alone, but in his hands he held his cherished book, and he was whispering between its pages the story of his sermon. Another moment and I had left the weird old preacher, his mysterious companion, and his dark and gruesome forever.”
Rev. Pridgeon lived a while longer. He had done something that not many ministers, or people for that matter, get to do. He preached at his own funeral. But his life had been his sermon. He was a healer of the body and a healer of the mind. He was ready to enter the “pearly gates” of Heaven.
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