From the Plow to the Pulpit

What a man! The book has such flavor. It combines several elements including a kind of folklore quality. I will be sharing it with all the folks around me.
–William Stafford, Winner National Book Award for Poetry

Even a heathen ought to read this! It is head and shoulders above the memoirs and diaries I receive here at Southern Illinois. And it is so professionally done. All the work is already done for a new publisher.
–Kinny Withers, Director Southern Illinois University Press

This is a beautiful, beautiful book. It has emotional integrity. It has intellectual integrity. It will appeal to a very broad market….
–Robert Baensch, Vice President of Marketing, Macmillan Publishing
Quality Paperback. ISBN: 0-937897-77-9 Dimensions in inches: 1.0 x 8.50 x 5.50. 27 black/white photographs. $9.95

About the Author

Tommie Frank Harper was born in the small rural community of Brooks, Georgia, in 1908. Though only forty miles from Atlanta, the Harper family’s Fayette County farm, where six mules and assorted men and boys grew 260 acres of cotton, was virtually the only world Tommie knew as a youth.

tommie harper and familyIt was only in 1938, when a Congregational Holiness revival group set up their tent in Brooks, that his prospects for a life beyond that farm suddenly changed. Slipping over to the revival with plans to cut the tent’s ropes, he underwent a conversion experience that resulted in an almost fifty-year career as a Church of God minister and administrator. He was soon conducting numerous revivals of the very type he had sought to disrupt, and went on to serve numerous pastorates.

Tommie Harper preached—and farmed—until he died in April of 1996. The last letter he wrote–the week before his death–was to the Georgia Agriculture Market Bulletin. In the letter he asked, after seeing a picture of such a feat in the Bulletin, for information on how to grow sweet potatoes in a wash tub.

The last sermon he preached in the spring of 1996 was as full of fervor and dedication and commitment as the first he preached in a farmhouse in Fayette County, Georgia, the week after he was converted. (adapted from Georgia Historical Review)