Shettles, Elijah L., 1852-1940

Elijah Leroy Shettles (1852-1940), Methodist minister, magazine editor, publisher, and bibliographer was born in 1852 in the Flatwoods country of Mississippi near Pontotoc, the son of Abner and Caroline (Browning) Shettles. His maternal grandfather, the family patriarch, was a Baptist minister and had a lifelong influence on Shettles. During his eighty-eight years Shettles worked as a teacher, a farm-implement salesman, a law student, a pressman for a newspaper, a freight agent, a public weigher, a coal supplier, a gambler, a saloonkeeper, an insurance solicitor, a preacher, a church administrator, an editor, a book collector and dealer, and a representative of several university and public libraries. He was also a chaplain of the Texas Senate, a publisher of books, and a humanitarian.

From 1881 to 1891 he traveled the Southwest as a hard-drinking, cheating, itinerate gambler, who frequently stopped long enough in a town to operate a gambling hall and saloon: most of these years he spent in Texas. Shettles responded to a revival preacher on April 27, 1891 and soon after felt a calling to the Methodist ministry. Shettles's ministerial career, all of it in Texas, spanned over thirty years. Always a devoted bibliophile, he revealed much of his secular reading in his early sermons. He became an accomplished preacher and in 1908 became assistant editor of the Texas Methodist Historical Quarterly . Shettles married Mrs. Elizabeth Letts, a widow, on December 11, 1894. They had no children but raised several foster children. Shettles retired in 1921 and moved to Austin, where he devoted himself to book collecting. He made significant contributions to the development of the libraries at Rice Institute, Sam Houston State Teachers College, Southern Methodist University, and the University of Texas. SMU received Shettles's collection of Wesleyana, and the University of Texas and the Texas State Library received his personal papers.

In the 1930s Shettles wrote his autobiography, which was published in several forms. Part of it appeared as articles in the Southwestern Advocate, and some of it was published in the Pontotoc (Mississippi) Progress . It appeared as a book, Recollections of a Long Life, in 1973. Shettles also published articles in the Arkansas Methodist, as well as several books, including William S. Red's The Texas Colonists and Religion (1924) and Don Bigger's Our Sacred Monkeys (1933). Shettles died on May 30, 1940 in Austin and was buried there.

Source: Handbook of Texas Online, s.v. McDonald, Archie P., http://www.tshaonline.org/handbook/online/articles/SS/fsh29.html (accessed August 28, 2009).

From the guide to the Elijah L. Shettles papers on the founding of Southern Methodist University SMU 1991. 0014., 1896-1936, 1909-1934, (Southern Methodist University Archives, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University)