Appalachian Figures
On a summer day in 1965, a knot of clergy crowded in behind West Virginia governor Hulett Smith as he signed the bill that abolished capital punishment in the state. Somewhere in that black-robed cluster stood a slight, sharp-eyed Methodist minister from the coalfields who had spent years arguing that the state had no right to take a life.
Just a few years earlier, the same preacher had crisscrossed West Virginia warning that a proposed liquor-by-the-drink amendment would flood the state with booze. He debated pro-liquor advocates on courthouse stages, sparred with newspaper columnists, and even went undercover into taverns to watch the law being broken.
His name was Lyscum Elbert Crowson, usually shortened in print to L. E. or simply “Rev. Crowson.” Born in rural Mississippi, educated in Kentucky, and seasoned in the boom-and-bust parsonages of the South, he spent most of his career in the coalfields and small towns of West Virginia. At midcentury he became one of the most controversial religious voices in the state, a man who fought liquor and the gallows with equal fervor.
This is his story, told through the church minutes, local obituaries, and newspaper dust-ups that preserved his trail across Appalachia.
From De Kalb to Asbury College
Lyscum Elbert Crowson entered the world on June 26, 1903, in De Kalb, the small seat of Kemper County, Mississippi. His father, Frederick Lawrence Crowson, was a Methodist Episcopal Church, South minister, and his mother was Elizabeth S. Pope.
Like many preacher’s kids in the early twentieth century, Lyscum grew up in motion. Methodist appointments typically shifted every few years, and the Crowsons moved among circuits in Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida. A family genealogy compiled in the mid-twentieth century remembers him as one of the minister’s sons, brother to another clergyman, Ernest H. Crowson, raised in a home where the rhythms of revival meetings and annual conferences shaped daily life.
By eighteen he held a license to preach. From there he headed north to Wilmore, Kentucky, to attend Asbury College, a holiness-leaning Methodist school whose graduates fanned out across the mission fields of the South and abroad. Both genealogical sources and Asbury alumni material list him as a member of the mid-1920s graduating classes.
After Asbury, Crowson returned to the Deep South and, on August 31, 1927, married Marion Aline Purdom in Florida. Their marriage appears in the state’s marriage index under the name “L. E. Crowson,” one of the first official records to fix him in adulthood. Together they would raise two daughters, carrying the itinerant life of the parsonage into yet another generation.
A Pastor in the Coalfields
The records grow thicker once Crowson moves into Appalachia. Denominational minutes and small-town obituaries begin to show “Rev. L. E. Crowson” officiating funerals and guest-preaching in the same coalfield communities that dot any West Virginia highway map.
In 1940, for example, the obituary of Webster County businessman Henry Lee Hamrick lists Crowson among the ministers who conducted the funeral in Webster Springs, placing him in that mountain town early in his West Virginia ministry.
By 1950, a funeral notice for Charles William Boardwine in the Bluefield Daily Telegraph identifies him as pastor of the Gary Methodist Church in McDowell County, one of the most intensely mined corners of the southern coalfields. Later in the decade, Cumberland and Westernport papers in neighboring Maryland describe him as pastor of Trinity Methodist Church when he conducts funerals for parishioners whose lives straddled the Potomac River and the West Virginia line.
These scattered notices may seem ordinary. To a historian, though, they draw a dotted line across the coalfield map: Gary, Bluefield, Trinity Methodist on the Potomac, and later Logan and Kanawha County. They show Crowson doing the daily work of a midcentury Methodist preacher, marrying couples, burying miners and homemakers, dedicating babies, and preaching to congregations whose paychecks rose and fell with coal prices.
His own conference remembered him that way. Later rolls of the West Virginia Annual Conference list Lyscum E. Crowson among deceased clergy, with a career that stretched from the 1930s into the 1980s and closed in Moorefield, where he retired and, in 1993, died at age ninety.
The Liquor Wars of the 1960s
Chairing the Citizens Committee
If Crowson’s early ministry was typical, the 1960s were anything but. West Virginia entered that decade in the throes of an argument over alcohol that had been simmering since Prohibition. State law allowed liquor to be sold only in state stores and private clubs. Business leaders, tourism promoters, and some politicians pushed for a constitutional amendment that would permit restaurants to serve “liquor by the drink.”
Opposing them were the “drys,” many from evangelical churches. At their head in 1962 stood Rev. L. E. Crowson, chairman of the Citizens Committee for the Defeat of the Liquor Amendment. The amendment’s history, as summarized in later accounts of West Virginia alcohol law, credits his committee with organizing a statewide campaign that included rallies, debates, and a barrage of church-based lobbying.
In April 1962, the Beckley Post-Herald sent reporter J. Richard Toren north with Crowson as he carried his message into the state’s industrial panhandle, a region perceived as friendlier to wet forces. Toren’s piece, titled “Panhandle Debate: Dry Leader Going into ‘Lion’s Den’,” portrayed the Logan pastor as a determined foe of the amendment, willing to challenge pro-liquor groups in their own back yard.
The following month, another Beckley story, “Crowson and Hubbard Clash: Liquor by the Drink Debated Before Small City Crowd,” detailed a public debate that set him opposite a pro-amendment speaker. While the surviving summaries do not preserve every line, they agree on the shape of the contest: Crowson framed liquor-by-the-drink as a moral and civic danger, while his opponent stressed revenue, modern tourism, and personal freedom.
Elsewhere he worked the political angles. A Raleigh Register article from November 4, 1962, ran under the headline “Crowson Asks Governor To Act,” reporting his demand that state officials enforce existing liquor laws more vigorously. The Weirton Daily Times covered the Citizens Committee’s activities in the northern steel towns as the referendum neared.
On election day, the drys prevailed. The liquor-by-the-drink amendment failed, a defeat that contemporary and later writers alike linked in part to the relentless statewide campaign led by Crowson and his allies. The legislature would later adopt a different system of regulated alcohol sales, but for a time the coalfields’ most famous dry leader had won his biggest battle.
Feuding with the Press
Victory did not soften his rhetoric. Throughout the early 1960s, Crowson clashed publicly with West Virginia newspapers, particularly the Beckley Post-Herald and its columnists.
On September 15, 1962, a Beckley headline announced “Dry Lashes Out at City’s Press.” The article described Crowson denouncing the local papers for what he saw as biased and misleading coverage of the liquor fight. In reply, columnists fired back. Roy Lee Harmon, writing in a 1964 opinion piece titled “Hypocritical Legislators Represent Hypocritical Constituents Well,” complained that the minister was “militant” and “fanatical” and even likened him to a “plague of locusts.”
Other writers took a more ambivalent view. A 1967 feature, “Salute to Kanawha’s Rev. L. E. Crowson!,” acknowledged his influence in county politics. While not uncritical, the piece recognized that few figures had shaped local debate over liquor and public morality as forcefully as he had.
The press feuds mattered. They turned a small-town Methodist preacher into a statewide character. West Virginians who never heard him preach came to know him from headlines, letters to the editor, and editorials that either praised his principles or rolled their eyes at his tactics.
Undercover in the Bars
Then there were the stories. The most famous involves Crowson going undercover into private clubs that he suspected of illegal liquor sales. As he told it, he would order a drink in order to prove that alcohol was being served, then find a way to dispose of it without compromising his teetotaler convictions.
In one widely circulated anecdote, a Charleston Gazette letter-writer claimed that Crowson secretly poured his drink into another patron’s shoe. Later reporting revealed the shoe story as a spoof, but it stuck to the preacher’s public image. Long after the 1962 amendment fight, West Virginians could still recall the tale of the dry crusader who would rather ruin his own footwear than swallow a shot of whiskey.
Fighting the Gallows
If liquor was one of Crowson’s obsessions, capital punishment was another. He opposed the death penalty both on religious grounds and because, as he repeatedly argued, there was no solid evidence that it deterred crime.
Here, he found himself on the forward edge of a broader movement. West Virginia had used capital punishment since statehood, executing prisoners at the state penitentiary in Moundsville. The last execution occurred in 1959. In the early 1960s, legislators began to consider abolition, aided by church leaders who framed the issue as a matter of Christian conscience.
An influential study of the state’s death-penalty history, “‘Thy Brother’s Blood’: Capital Punishment in West Virginia,” notes that Crowson was a consistent and vocal critic of executions, part of a coalition of clergy that pressed for permanent abolition. When Governor Hulett Smith finally signed the 1965 law ending the death penalty, Crowson was among the ministers invited to stand behind him, a visual acknowledgment that religious lobbying had helped carry the day.
The fight did not end there. In 1969, when some legislators proposed reinstating the death penalty, the Weirton Daily Times reported on a Senate hearing under the headline “Ministers Oppose Death Penalty.” Crowson testified alongside other clergy, reiterating both his theological objections and his belief that there was no credible evidence the gallows made citizens safer.
Their arguments prevailed. West Virginia never restored capital punishment. In later summaries of the state’s death-penalty history, Crowson appears as one of the faces of religious opposition, evidence that a fiercely conservative moralist could also stand firmly against state violence.
Trouble at General Conference
Crowson’s activism did not stop at the state line. Throughout his adult life he took part in the insider politics of the wider Methodist church, often aligning himself with conservative causes in denominational debates.
The most famous clash came in 1960 at the Methodist General Conference in Denver. That spring, Senator John F. Kennedy was seeking the presidency, and many Protestants worried that a Catholic president might answer more to Rome than to the Constitution.
At Denver, Crowson introduced a resolution aimed at discrediting Kennedy’s candidacy on religious grounds. The Associated Press story that spread across the country under the headline “Methodists Block Slap at Kennedy” described his proposal and the conference’s overwhelming rejection of it. Delegates rebuked the resolution as unfair and divisive, and it failed by a wide margin.
The incident fit a pattern. Later General Conference minutes show “L. E. Crowson (West Virginia)” frequently at the microphone, asking pointed questions about minority reports and speaking in support of conservative positions on matters ranging from civil-rights marches to church social statements.
Within West Virginia Methodism, denominational histories such as Melting Times: A History of West Virginia United Methodism remember the midcentury conferences as hotly contested arenas where figures like Crowson sometimes made bishops and fellow pastors alike uncomfortable.
Home Life and Family Memory
Institutional records tell one version of Crowson’s story. His children remembered another.
His daughter Faith grew up in parsonages across the coalfields, including the years when he was pastor in Logan. In an obituary that later circulated online, she was remembered as “the daughter of a fundamentalist Methodist minister in West Virginia,” a phrase that captures both the affection and the strictness that marked their household.
Family accounts recall rules against dancing, strict limits on movies and popular music, and expectations that the Crowson girls would attend Asbury, the same holiness college where their father had studied. An Asbury alumni magazine from the 1970s notes that “Rev. L. E. Crowson ’25 assisted in the ordination” of one of the Ruperts, almost certainly a reference to Faith’s family, a small sign that the ties between Asbury and the Crowsons remained strong.
It is not hard to see the link between that parsonage discipline and Crowson’s public crusades. For him, morality was a seamless fabric. The same convictions that led him to resist liquor-by-the-drink also led him to oppose capital punishment and to demand that church leaders draw sharp lines on doctrinal and social issues.
A Figure of Vanishing Taboos
Crowson died in August 1993 in West Virginia, with his obituary in the Cumberland Times listing his long years of pastoral service, his wife and daughters, and his standing as “Dr. L. E. Crowson,” a title that suggests an honorary degree late in life.
A month later, Charleston journalist James A. Haught used him as a touchstone in an opinion column titled “Recalling Long-Vanished Taboos.” Looking back over midcentury West Virginia, Haught described a world of blue laws, censorship battles, and fierce moral campaigns against liquor and gambling, and he held Crowson up as a representative figure of that earlier era.
The article did not treat him simply as a villain. Instead, it framed him as part of a generation whose certainties were fading. By the early 1990s, West Virginia had liquor-by-the-drink in regulated form, open Sunday commerce in many places, and a public far less likely to rally behind a “dry” crusade, even from the pulpit. Yet the state still had no death penalty, and that, Haught and other historians noted, owed something to the persistence of clergy like Lyscum Crowson.
Today, local history pages from De Kalb quietly list him among that small Mississippi town’s notable sons. Astro-biographical websites recycle his birth data and a portrait photo sourced from Wikimedia, testimony to the odd ways digital culture remembers earlier fundamentalists.
For Appalachian history, though, Crowson’s importance lies closer to home. He stood in the pulpits of coalfield churches during the upheavals of midcentury, when mines mechanized, unions rose and fell, and state government struggled to decide what “public morals” should look like. He exemplified a strand of mountain religion that mixed hard-line personal piety with a deep suspicion of state violence.
He could be, as his critics said, militant and fanatical. He could also be, as his presence at the 1965 abolition signing suggests, an agent of mercy at the very moment the law laid down its sword. That tension makes Rev. Lyscum E. Crowson one of the more fascinating, and complicated, figures in Appalachian religious history.
Sources & Further Reading
“Crowson and Hubbard Clash: Liquor by the Drink Debated Before Small City Crowd,” Beckley Post-Herald, May 15, 1962. Wikipedia
J. Richard Toren, “Panhandle Debate: Dry Leader Going into ‘Lion’s Den’,” Beckley Post-Herald and Register, April 8, 1962. Wikipedia
“Crowson Asks Governor To Act,” Raleigh Register (Beckley, WV), November 4, 1962. Wikipedia
“Dry Lashes Out at City’s Press,” Beckley Post-Herald, September 15, 1962. Wikipedia+1
George W. Cornell, “Methodists Block Slap at Kennedy,” Associated Press report as printed in The Gadsden Times, May 1, 1960. Wikipedia+1
“‘Ministers Oppose Death Penalty,’” Weirton Daily Times, February 10, 1969, p. 16. Wikipedia+1
“Minister Finds The Shoe is On the Other Foot,” syndicated in Sarasota Herald-Tribune, January 12, 1967. Wikipedia
“Local Area Obituaries: Dr. L. E. Crowson, Moorefield, WV,” The Cumberland (MD) Times, August 28, 1993, p. 8. Wikipedia+1
James A. Haught, “Recalling Long-Vanished Taboos,” Charleston Gazette, September 21, 1993. smokyhole.org+1
Henry Lee Hamrick obituary, Webster Springs, WV, 1940, and other funeral notices listing Rev. L. E. Crowson as officiant, including the Charles William Boardwine obituary reprinted in Rambling Roots and obituaries preserved on Find-a-Grave and local history sites. Find A Grave+3Find A Grave+3ramblingroots.com+3
Asbury College alumni magazine, vol. 40, no. 3, noting Rev. L. E. Crowson ’25 and the Rupert family. kdl.kyvl.org
“A Rector Emeritus on Calling a Rector,” The Witness (Episcopal magazine), December 4, 1959, mentioning Rev. L. E. Crowson of Logan, West Virginia, in connection with marriage law and capital punishment work in the West Virginia Council of Churches. Episcopal Church Digital Archives
The Crowson Family, family genealogy volume (digitized via Internet Archive), entry on “Lyscum E. Crowson (1903–)” listing him as son of Rev. Frederick L. Crowson, brother of Rev. Ernest H. Crowson, graduate of Asbury College, and Methodist pastor in West Virginia. Internet Archive
Florida marriage index entry “L. E. Crowson, Florida Marriages, 1830–1993,” for his marriage to Marion Aline Purdom, August 31, 1927 (FamilySearch). FamilySearch
World War II draft registration card for Lyscum Elbert Crowson, “West Virginia, World War II Draft Registration Cards, 1940–1945” (FamilySearch). Florida United Methodists+1
Journals and historical rolls of the West Virginia Annual Conference (United Methodist Church), listing L. E. Crowson among clergy and summarizing his appointments. wvumc.org+1
“Lyscum Elbert Crowson,” Wikipedia, last revised October 15, 2025, which helpfully compiles references to his political activism and biographical data drawn from the sources above. Wikipedia
Stan Bumgardner and Christine M. Kreiser, “‘Thy Brother’s Blood’: Capital Punishment in West Virginia,” West Virginia Historical Society Quarterly, vol. IX, no. 4 and vol. X, no. 1 (1996). Wikipedia
Christine M. Kreiser, “Capital Punishment,” e-WV: The West Virginia Encyclopedia (online, updated 2024), for broader context on the state’s abolition of the death penalty. wvencyclopedia.org
“Alcohol laws of West Virginia,” Wikipedia, particularly the discussion of the 1962 liquor-by-the-drink amendment and the Citizens Committee for the Defeat of the Liquor Amendment. Wikipedia
Carl E. Burrows, Robert B. Florian, and David F. Mahoney, Melting Times: A History of West Virginia United Methodism (Charleston, WV: Commission on Archives and History, West Virginia Conference, United Methodist Church, 1984), for context on Methodist life in the state during Crowson’s career. Google Books+1
Astro-biographical profiles (MyAstropedia, Ask-Oracle) which restate basic biographical details and rehost a portrait photograph derived from Wikimedia. My Astro+1