Manuscript Sermons at age 14.
MANUSCRIPT BOOK OF SERMONS BY A 14-YEAR-OLD GIRL
IN A PASTORAL RECORD BOOK
Lusk, H[ugh] K. and Ellie Lusk. Composite Manuscript Book, Pastoral Record of the Associate
Congregation of Cambridge [N. Y.] by H. K. Lusk, with Book of Sermons written by Ellie Lusk in
the 14th year of her age. Mechanicsburgh, Cum[berland] Co. Pa.
8vo.; ruled blank book; half calf, marbled boards, gilt rules.
68 pages of text (plus notes on the rear paste-down and an elaborate juvenile pencil drawing on
the rear free endpaper), of which 14 pages are given over to pastoral records (baptisms,
admissions to membership, deaths and removals, marriages), 5 pages are given to a pencil copy of
a poem that begins, “In a lonely cot on the mountain top, Lived an old man & his only child,” and
the balance to detailed summaries of sermons heard preached by young Ellie Lusk.
Piecing the story together from census records and gravestones, Hugh Lusk appears to have been
an Associate Presbyterian minister born ca. 1823 in Pennsylvania, working in the 1850s with a
flock in Cambridge, N.Y. (near the Vermont border, east of Saratoga Springs) and living with his
wife Margaret (born ca. 1829); by 1860 he appears widowed and living in Plum, Penna. (east of
Pittsburgh) with his seven-year-old son James, his five-year-old daughter Ellie, and a Scottish
domestic named Jane White; H. K. Lusk's gravestone in Mechanicsburg gives his death as June
25, 1862 “in his 39th year.” That the orphaned Ellie, raised in the bosom of the conservative
Scots-Irish Associate Reformed church, would be tasked with taking down some 26 sermons on a
variety of topics seems unsurprising, and she accomplishes it with a legible hand (and fairly good
spelling) in ink and some pencil throughout. The elaborate pencil drawing in the rear (of a woman
in a fancy dress) is charmingly suggestive of some more worldly interests on the part of young
Miss Lusk. The pastoral records – interspersed among the later sermon notes – give a fairly
detailed view of the life of a church in 1850s New York. The original source of the untitled poem
has not yet been discovered.
(#4656642)
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