THE SALT THAT SAVES AMERICA

Jeff D. Ray

Many big men and women are in the limelight these days — great financiers, great inventors, great writers, great musicians, great statesmen, great preachers, great aviators and on and on. All of these are valuable but the salt that saves the nation will not be found in any of these. The real saving salt is in a multitude of ordinary people who plod along in obscurity living with no flourish of trumpets and no thought of fame, the clean, unselfish, neighborly God fearing life.

One of that large multitude of nation-savers passed away in Tarrant County the other day when Mrs. Isabella Pool Brown died. If she had lived five days longer she would have reached her eighty-fifth birthday. She had lived in the same neighborhood a few miles south of Fort Worth forty-eight years and had lived forty-one years in the modest house in which she died.

She was one of ten children. She was the daughter of a Baptist preacher, the sister of four preachers (one of them being the beloved W. A. Pool of Tarrant County). She was the wife of a Baptist preacher, the mother of a Baptist preacher, the grandmother (including two by marriage) of five Baptist preachers, the aunt of four Baptist preachers.

She was the mother of ten children and personally led each one of them to the Savior. She had been a member of the Baptist church sixty-eight years — forty-eight years at Kennedale and, though she never made a public speech in her life nor went as a delegate to a religious convention1, she perhaps did more for a half century to keep the little church at Kennedale on the right track than any other human being. She knew her Bible as well as (perhaps better than) any preacher in Texas. You could quote a Scripture and almost without fail she could tell you the chapter and verse; or you could give chapter and verse and she would quote the Scripture. Universally known among them as "Aunt Bell" she was the trusted helpful friend of all her neighbors and dying carried to her grave their respect, their confidence, their love. She was borne to her grave by six of her grandsons— all stalwart Christian men.

I make no invidious comparison nor discount the valuable service the more prominent and spectacular women render to society, but I do not hesitate to say that the future righteousness of our nation depends not on women in high public position but on modest home-making mothers who are content to bear children and rear them for God. Valuable as they may be the nation can survive without women in public life but it cannot survive without such mothers as Isabella Brown.

Baptist Standard - Volume XL, Number 16 - Dallas, Texas - April 19, 1928 – Page 15

"On March 13 at Kennedale, I officiated at the funeral of Grandma Brown, one of the outstanding Baptists of this section for many years. Mrs. Terrah Isabella Pool Brown was born March 37, 1843 in Alexander County, North Carolina. She came to Texas in the year 1879, with her husband. Ten children were born to them. Mrs. Brown has fifty grand children living and fifty-four great grandchildren. She was the daughter of a Missionary Baptist preacher; her husband, son, four brothers, three grandsons and four nephews have been preachers. Grandma Brown has been a reader of the Standard since the first publication." — D. W. Boone.

Baptist Standard - Volume XL, Number 13 - Dallas, Texas - March 29, 1928 - Page 7

1 Note of correction by her 3rd great grandson, Devin Pipes, she was in fact a "messenger" (delegate) from Kennedale Baptist Church to the Tarrant County Baptist Association for at least the year 1910, the year after her husband the Rev. D. Bedford Brown (former preacher of Kennedale Baptist) died.