[Also on Substack] In her ninth month with her third child, Ellen Agnes Moore Sellers must have heard the heartrending news. On March 17, 1901, a stove fire had raced through the Hill family’s log cabin, just west of her home in Wellston, Ohio, and north of the Catholic cemetery. The charred remains of Jefferson Hill, his wife Amanda, and their little ones, Julia (born 1892), Willie, Effie, Harry, and Della (born 1900) were not recovered until the next day. Mr. Hill had been a miner for Wellston Coal. Townspeople erected a tombstone in their memory.[1]
An octave of days later, on March 25th, Ellen gave birth to Otis Quinter Sellers Jr. Conceived in the 19th century, he was born a dozen weeks into the 20th. A few weeks earlier, on March 9, The New York Times had noted the publication of Booker T. Washington’s Up from Slavery. When Otis was a half-year-old, an anarchist’s bullet felled William McKinley, the fifth of seven US presidents to hail from the Buckeye State. Theodore Roosevelt, his successor, was the first president of whom Otis was cognizant. A month after taking the oath of office, Roosevelt made history by inviting Washington to dine with him at the White House.[2]
America’s adventure in the Philippines would last another year. The Progressive era ended with America’s entry into the European war, but that carnage was not even on the horizon. At the turn of the century, America was flush with optimism, fueled by industrial growth and confidence in science’s promise. The month preceding Otis’s birth, US Steel became the first billion-dollar corporation. The day he was born, inventor Alexander Graham Bell typed a seven-page scientific and business letter to his wife Mabel,[3] and Gottlieb Daimler introduced the Mercedes automobile in Nice, France.[4] Bad news, local or national, could not dampen the country’s upbeat mood.
Wellston, then a bustling town of 5,000 on Jackson County’s northern border in Ohio’s southeast, occupies the upper edge of America’s Bible Belt. Otis’s roots in the industrial powerhouse that was Ohio ran deep, even back to the country’s founding. Otis’s great-grandfather, John H. Sellers, an early settler of Greenfield, Ohio (founded 1799), sold furniture. One son, James, owned that city’s marble works; another, Grover Comstock Sellers (1848-1899), Otis’s grandfather, was a near-contemporary of Harvey Wells (1846-1896). Wells was the Ohio Constitutional Convention committeeman and entrepreneur who founded the city in 1873 (and named it after himself). Otis said he “never cared a great deal about” genealogy, but he did mention Grover, if rarely.[5] Grover was of the last century, Otis of the new.[6]
Raised Roman Catholic (like Otis’s mother), Grover left that communion: the pastor funded church construction by assessing parishioners at $100 a head, regardless of income. Grover had 13 children: an assessment of $1,500 in 19th-century dollars “from a man with a little feed stock,” as Otis put it. In protest, Grover enrolled with the Baptists and went on to hold every position in that denomination except minister.
The elder Otis Q. Sellers (1873-1946), originally from Greenfield, was the third of five offspring of Grover and Mary Sellers (just as Otis Junior was the third in his family). Active in the produce business, Otis père held patents for a packing ring and a lubricating wheel. In 1906, he organized the Eclipse Car Wheel Company and leased the foundry to manufacture his patented minecart wheel.[7] He gave up the lease on the foundry two years later and moved the family to St. Albans.[8] “I remember [the move] quite well. I was seven years of age. . . . [W]e were just there for one year.”[9] Otis recalled in 1972:
One time my father was a foundryman. One of my earliest memories is of playing around that foundry. I used to play in the molding sand. . . . It was always damp. We could make all kinds of houses and tunnels and so on. Since my father was superintendent of the foundry, no one could stop us. Then at night, they would do what they call “pouring off.” Molders put the molds in the sand, separate them, take out the pattern. Now they were going to cast the mold.
We knew what a casting was. Most people think to cast something is to throw it down. Not in the least. Ballō means “to cast.” That’s where our word “ball” comes from. Kataballō [καταβάλλω] means “cast along certain lines.” They would pour molten iron into these molds. They cast them along certain lines. When they set, they would shake them out, and pull them out, they would be cleaned with sandblasting. . . . My father made minecart wheels, and it was amazing to see the rim, the spokes, the hub of that minecart wheel after it had gone through the [casting] process. . . . That’s what kataballō means.[10]
Ellen, the mother great with child, married Otis Senior in 1898. Like her husband, she was one of thirteen. Together, they raised six of their own: James and Mary before Otis; after, Helen (who would help Otis enroll in the Social Security system), Lawrence (“Jack”), and Dorothy (“Dottie Mae”), who lived with her parents in Cincinnati.[11] One day in St. Albans, Otis glimpsed the cover of The Mother Tongue, James’s schoolbook. “Mother tongue!” Otis guffawed: in his whole life, all seven years of it, he had never heard anything so ridiculous. Your “mother tongue,” Ellen explained, is the language you learn from your mother; English is the one he learned from her. That shut him up.[12]
In the Bible commentaries he recorded decades later, one can detect the accents and rhythms he absorbed in southeastern Ohio in the early 20th century from his parents, relatives, neighbors, and teachers, who learned their mother tongue in the previous century. Otis says he underwent the ceremony of baptism at age 12, and therefore probably in 1913, but didn’t profess faith in Jesus Christ until he was 18.[13] His was not a “believer’s baptism.” Almost twenty years later, questions about this order of events provoked a crisis of fellowship, one he resolved by leaving the Baptists. This break renders problematic any facile identification of Sellers as a Fundamentalist. One fruit of his investigation of this question was the demarcation he discerned between the Acts dispensation and ours, a divide that, as we shall see, has ecclesiological implications.
Otis suffered the slings and arrows common to all kids. One day, he hadn’t done his homework. Called upon to read his composition aloud, he extemporized, pretending there were sentences on the blank page he held. The superintendent of schools happened to be visiting. “You have to hear the best composition ever!” Otis’s teacher promised the visitor. Unfortunately, he couldn’t repeat his performance. Years later, on Wellston High’s football team, Otis was the proud owner of the highest quality shoes, but when he was benched, the coach claimed them for his best player, whose cleats were falling apart.
The Sellers men, especially Otis Sr., James, and Otis Jr., shared the concerns of millions of other Christians about theological liberalism, marked as it was by a low view of Scripture and accommodation to modernist secularism. Otis Q. Sellers was a “countermodernist,” a label that summed up American Fundamentalism’s posture, even if he didn’t subscribe to everything Fundamentalists believed, although he affirmed the “fundamentals” (as do most professing Christians, at least formally). Modernism, with its evolution and higher criticism, was (and arguably remains) the general threat. Bible conferences and study Bibles were weapons in the counterattack that coalesced into the Fundamentalist movement. The one unifier, which one scholar summed up as the “‘One Point Theology’ of Fundamentalism . . . developed between 1870 and 1925 and . . . appears in the contemporary expression of that theology: the inerrancy of the original manuscripts of the Bible.”[14]
Otis took this “One Point Theology” seriously. This future maverick expositor was raised on the Bible Belt’s northern edge during the Bible conference movement’s growth. He affirmed faith in Christ on November 23, 1919, ten days after the armistice ending the Great War was signed.[15]
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I expound the scriptural basis of Sellers’s dispensationalist ecclesiology—non-Darby/Scofield—in Christian Individualism: The Maverick Biblical Workmanship of Otis Q. Sellers, which I expect to be published mid-year (God willing) by Atmosphere Press. It’s in the interior design phase. This post is excerpted from that manuscript.
Notes
[1] “The Hill Family Tragedy of 1901, Wellston, Ohio,” June 27, 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Y1eAwgW-Os.
[2] The term of George Henry White (NC-R), the last African American in Congress after Reconstruction, expired in 1901, the year of Otis’s nativity; not until 1928, the year he was appointed pastor of the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church in Newport, Kentucky, would an African American, Oscar De Priest (IL-R), again be elected to Congress.
[3] Letter from Alexander Graham Bell to Mabel Hubbard Bell, March 25, 1901. https://www.loc.gov/resource/magbell.04100416/?sp=1.
[4] Ed Begley, who played one of Hollywood’s Twelve Angry Men, was an exact contemporary of Otis’s, but predeceased him by 22 years in 1970.
[5] Otis Q. Sellers, “Interpreting Romans 1,” TL 499.
[6] Grover Sellers and Harvey Wells were Civil War veterans. At that conflict’s conclusion in 1865, Grover, a lad of 17, went to work in Wellston’s First National Bank. As “Wells” was the maiden name of Julia (1824-1902), Otis’s paternal great-grandmother (John’s wife), she may have shared lineage with Harvey, which might explain the Sellers clan’s eastward sojourn from Greenfield to Wellston. For a photo of Grover Comstock Sellers’s gravestone, see https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/95263070/grover-comstock-sellers.
[7] A search of <Official Gazette of the United States Otis Q. Sellers> returned this: https://www.google.com/books/edition/Official_Gazette_of_the_United_States_Pa/bOh8AAAAMAAJ?q=otis+q+sellers+ohio&gbpv=1&bsq=sellers#f=false.
[8] A History of Industry in Jackson County, compiled and edited by Frank C. Morrow, 1956. Chapter 8, “Foundries.” “The Wellston Foundry,” 205-207. The plant ran under the limited management of J. H. Sellers, Otis Senior’s brother. Creditors had to be satisfied.
[9] Otis Q. Sellers, “1 Corinthians 14v1 to v40,” TL145, @4:40. Since he refers to the expulsion of Asians from Uganda, a rare contemporary clue, I infer that this was recorded in August 1972.
[10] Otis Q. Sellers, “Questions and Answers 4,” TL 498 @40:00ff. He was discussing “foundation” as a translation of the noun καταβολῆς (katabolēs) in Ephesians 1:4. His mind seemed to have gone directly to the roots κατα (kata) and βάλλω (ballō), but καταβάλλω does not appear in Ephesians (as it does in 2 Corinthians 4:9 and Hebrews 6:1).
[11] Dottie Mae was Otis’s first typist; Mildred Sellers, his second; their daughter Jane assumed this role while in grade school.
[12] Otis Q. Sellers, “1 Corinthians 14v1 to v40,” TL145.
[13] Otis Q. Sellers, “Concerning Baptism,” Seed & Bread, No. 134, March 10, 1971.
[14] Morris Ashcraft, “The Issue of Biblical Authority,” Faith and Mission, Vol. 1, No. 2, Spring 1984.
[15] Mark Sidwell, “‘Come Apart and Rest a While’: The Origin of the Bible Conference Movement in America,” Detroit Baptist Seminary Journal, 15 (2010), 75-98.