Appalachian Figures
Born in a railroad town on the Tennessee and Alabama line, Robert Hitchcock Spain entered the world in 1925 as one small line in a county birth book. Long before he became a United Methodist bishop, an author, or a chaplain in Nashville, he was simply “Robert Hitchcock Spain” in the clerk’s hand at Lawrenceburg, the son of two public school teachers in Loretto. The paper trail that survives in Lawrence County archives, naval records, church registers, and obituaries lets us follow the boy from the cotton fields and classrooms of southern Middle Tennessee to pulpits in Nashville and the mountain missions of Kentucky.
This is a story about a bishop, but even more than that it is the story of a particular man from Loretto, a Methodist preacher whose life work was sitting at hospital bedsides, burying the dead, writing short devotional pieces for co workers, and showing up when his people needed him. The scattered records of government offices and church conferences are not just bureaucratic scraps. Together, they sketch the long walk of “Bob” Spain from Lawrence County into the larger life of the Appalachian South and the wider Methodist world.
A Loretto birth in the books
The clearest starting point is a simple table on the Lawrence County Archives web site, which transcribes births from local registers for the 1920s and 1930s. In the section for 1925 appears: “Spain, Robert Hitchcock Spain, T. J. Hitchcock, Grace 10 26 25,” with a notation that he was white and the entry number in the original book.
That brief line confirms several things at once. It gives us his exact birth date, 26 October 1925, and it places him in Lawrence County, Tennessee, the product of a union between Thomas J. Spain and Grace Hitchcock. Later church and denominational biographies will remember his parents, James Thomas and Grace Cecille Hitchcock Spain, as public school teachers who raised their children in the Methodist faith in Loretto.
The birth entry also anchors him in an older local record keeping tradition. The transcription came from a volume preserved at the Lawrence County Archives and the original birth registers are now maintained on microfilm through the Tennessee State Library and Archives. For genealogists, this shows how a man who would later preside over annual conferences on the far side of the mountains still begins in the same county books as tenant farmers and railroad hands.
Loretto itself was a small place in the 1920s, a Catholic and Methodist crossroads along the old L&N line between Lawrenceburg and Florence. Local church records now held on microfilm at TSLA describe Loretto United Methodist Church’s registers of baptisms, marriages, members, and pastors, along with a historical sketch of the congregation. Those volumes almost certainly carried the names of the Spain family through the years, from the parents’ membership lines to the children’s baptisms and later pastor visits. Even where we have not yet opened every page, the archival finding aids tell us that the records exist and that they tie the bishop’s story to a particular sanctuary on the Lawrence County map.
Navy blue and South Pacific water
By his own church’s telling, Robert Spain did not stay long in the quiet of Loretto. At seventeen he enlisted in the United States Navy and served in the medical corps in the South Pacific during the Second World War.
That service places him within another set of primary sources. Young men born in 1925 were required to register for the draft and appear in the “U.S. World War II Draft Cards, Young Men, 1940–1947” collection, where a single card usually captures home address, next of kin, and a brief physical description. Muster rolls and station lists for Navy ships and bases in the South Pacific, preserved by the National Archives and digitized in databases of World War II Navy personnel, list enlisted men by rating and duty station. Together those records trace the young Tennessean’s movement away from home, first into basic training and then into the sprawling wartime Navy medical system.
The denominational obituary writers returned again and again to that season in his life. When the Council of Bishops announced his death in 2022, they summarized it plainly. Spain was born in Loretto, enlisted in the Navy at seventeen, and served as a medical corpsman in the South Pacific during the war. A separate remembrance from United Methodist News later noted that he carried a sense of pastoral care learned in those war years into the rest of his ministry, standing beside the sick and dying long after he folded his uniform away.
From pre med student to preacher
After the war, like so many returning servicemen, Spain turned to higher education. The Williamson County Public Library’s “Authors L through Z” guide, which includes a short sketch of Bishop Spain among local writers, notes that he studied pre medicine at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville before transferring to what is now the University of North Alabama, where he completed his undergraduate work.
Those years also brought him back toward home and toward ministry. Denominational biographical notes and the Council of Bishops release agree that after graduation he married Syble Mink of nearby Lawrenceburg and moved to Nashville, where he enrolled at Vanderbilt Divinity School while serving Spring Hill Methodist Church as a student pastor. Syble had attended Martin Methodist College in Pulaski and later worked as a high school teacher, so the couple shared the same mix of teaching, small town life, and Methodist church ties that had shaped his parents.
From a research standpoint, this stage of Spain’s life lives now in layers of institutional record. Vanderbilt’s divinity school catalogues list his degree, while local church registers for Spring Hill and other early appointments would preserve his name in marriage and baptism entries where “Rev. Robert Spain” appears in the pastor column. Conference journals for the Tennessee Annual Conference begin to mention him in ordination lists, appointment tables, and committee rosters once he became a full member of the conference. TSLA’s guide to Methodist records includes microfilmed journals of the Tennessee Conference that track pastors’ moves across the mid twentieth century.
Collinwood funerals and circuit riding
By the early 1950s, Spain had become, to the people who read their weekly local paper, “Rev. Robert Spain, pastor of the Methodist church.”
Wayne County’s genealogical web projects preserve transcripts from the Wayne County News. One obituary for an English born immigrant named Joseph D. Dunn, who died at his home outside Collinwood in July 1950, reports that “Rev. Robert Spain, pastor of the Methodist church” officiated at the funeral held at Dunn’s home. That short line is a primary window into Spain’s early ministry. It confirms that he was serving Collinwood in Wayne County by 1950 and that he took the sort of house funerals that were still common in south Tennessee at mid century.
Other regional newspapers tell similar stories. The Pulaski Citizen’s obituary columns for the 1970s record “Rev. Robert Spain of Nashville” conducting a funeral in Giles County, while an earlier Tennessee newspaper obituary for an elderly churchwoman notes that services were held at First Methodist Church with “the Rev. Robert Spain” officiating. These are not long articles about him, yet they locate him within the ordinary work of a Methodist pastor, traveling across county lines to bury the dead, comfort families, and represent the wider church.
Denominational summaries fill in the broader outline. Spain served in a series of pastorates in the Tennessee Conference, including First Methodist Church in Livingston, First Methodist in Lebanon, Belle Meade United Methodist Church in Nashville, and finally Brentwood United Methodist Church in Williamson County. TSLA’s guide to church records notes that the records of Belle Meade United Methodist Church, for example, contain membership rolls and baptismal registers from the years in which he would have been pastor. In those volumes his handwriting likely appears in the margin next to baptisms, marriages, and membership transfers.
These sources show Spain as many Middle Tennessee people would have known him. Not as a bishop or author, but as the preacher at the front of the sanctuary at Belle Meade, or the one standing in the front living room of a farmhouse outside Collinwood with a Bible in his hands.
Brentwood and the work of a bishop
By the late 1980s, Spain had become senior pastor of Brentwood United Methodist Church, a fast growing suburban congregation just south of Nashville with more than three thousand members. Annual Conference journals from this period list him as a delegate to General Conference and as a member of national level boards, including the General Board of Church and Society, the Board of Publications, and the General Council on Ministries.
In 1988, the Southeastern Jurisdictional Conference elected him bishop of the United Methodist Church. The official Council of Bishops press release later summarized that he was assigned to the Louisville Area, which included the Louisville and Kentucky Conferences and the Red Bird Missionary Conference, and that he served there until 1992. After the death of Bishop Joseph Bethea, Spain was asked to serve the South Carolina Conference until 1996.
In those years the paper trail widens. Jurisdictional and General Conference journals record his committee assignments and speeches. Red Bird Missionary Conference publications list him among those who presided over annual sessions in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. The Magee Christian Education Foundation’s Form 990 filings from the early 2000s list “Bishop Robert H Spain, Brentwood TN” as a director, confirming his ongoing ties to Christian educational work even after he returned from South Carolina.
From an Appalachian perspective, the Louisville assignment is particularly important. The Louisville Area at that time included churches in both the Bluegrass and the Appalachian coalfields, from Louisville itself to small United Methodist congregations along the North Fork of the Kentucky River and in the Red Bird Missionary Conference. In those years, Bishop Spain’s decisions and pastoral letters shaped life in some of the most isolated Methodist communities in the mountains.
Chaplain on the printing floor
Spain officially retired from the active episcopacy in 1992, but his longest single appointment came after retirement. The United Methodist Publishing House in Nashville invited him to serve as its full time chaplain.
A 2017 news release from UMPH marking his retirement from that role explains that he began visiting the publishing house after his time as bishop and then stayed for twenty five years. He made rounds through the offices, visited staff in the hospital, prayed and counseled with employees, led worship services, and wrote a weekly reflection titled “Chaplain’s Corner.” United Methodist News described him as a “tireless counselor” who cared for more than a thousand people at the Publishing House, continuing to preach and to offer pastoral care well into his nineties.
The Council of Bishops’ obituary adds a small, human detail. It remembers that he enjoyed woodworking, gardening, music, and travel, and that “through his life he blessed so many with his care, prayers, and numerous handwritten notes.” Those handwritten notes, the sort of thing that seldom survives in archives except by accident, were part of his personal ministry to coworkers and friends. The public record tells us that he was bishop and chaplain. The memories of those who worked with him remember the small pieces of paper with a pastor’s script scrawled across them.
Books, sermons, and an “uncertain sound”
If you want to hear Bishop Spain’s voice, the best place to start today is not the minutes of a conference but one of his books. In 1992 Abingdon Press published his volume How to Stay Alive as Long as You Live: Practical Guides for Christian Living. Google Books lists the work as 142 pages long, with the subject categories “Religion / Christian Living / General” and “Religion / Christian Living / Inspirational. Around 1996 Abingdon released his shorter volume Getting Ready to Preach, a practical guide for sermon preparation that has been used for decades in preaching classes and pastor workshops.
His Amazon author page gathers these titles under his name, showing that his work still circulates among pastors and laypeople who have never heard of Loretto, Tennessee.
Beyond print, one primary recording stands out. Asbury Theological Seminary’s eCommons archive lists a chapel sermon by Robert H. Spain titled “An uncertain sound,” preached in 1989 and preserved as audio and PDF. The title echoes the language of First Corinthians about a trumpet that gives an uncertain sound, a passage long used by Protestant preachers to urge clarity in proclamation. In that single sermon we can hear a Loretto born bishop preaching to seminarians, balancing the practical advice of Getting Ready to Preach with the pastoral warning that if the church’s sound is uncertain, people will not know how to prepare for the battles they face.
The weekly “Chaplain’s Corner” columns he wrote for employees of the Publishing House from the early 1990s until 2017 are another major primary source for his thought. UMPH’s retirement article refers to them as a regular part of his chaplaincy and internal archives likely preserve the full run. Taken together, the books, sermons, and short devotional pieces present a pastor who was less interested in abstract theology than in giving readers and hearers concrete, usable Christian practices that could carry them through ordinary life.
Scholarships, students, and the long reach of Loretto
The Spain story also runs through the world of Methodist higher education. Martin Methodist College in Pulaski, now the University of Tennessee Southern, established the Spain Scholarship Fund in 2001 to honor “bishop and Mrs. Robert Spain for their many years of extraordinary leadership and service to the United Methodist Church.” The scholarship gives first priority to students preparing for church related vocations and those active in the Center for Church Leadership.
The United Methodist Higher Education Foundation’s annual review and online memorial pages note that Bishop Robert and Syble Spain were deeply committed to helping United Methodist students in Tennessee obtain higher education, and that the scholarship fund named for them has awarded hundreds of thousands of dollars to students at what is now UT Southern.
Through the Magee Christian Education Foundation, where the 2002 IRS Form 990 lists him as a director, Spain also supported scholarships for theological students and funding for Appalachian ministries, including Asbury Theological Seminary and programs connected with the Red Bird Missionary Conference. This work extended his earlier episcopal concern for mountain churches into financial support for a new generation of pastors.
In this way the man whose own beginnings appear in a simple local birth register entry ends up shaping the education of students he never met, many of them from the same river valleys and hills where he first learned to read.
What the records tell us about the man
Taken individually, each record feels small. A line in a birth register. An entry in a funeral notice. A reference in a conference journal. A scholarship description in a college catalog. None of them can tell us everything about Spain’s character. Combined, though, they paint a consistent picture.
The Lawrence County birth transcription shows a child born to two school teachers, rooted in a town where Methodist membership rolls and school records often overlapped. The naval collections mark him as part of the generation that left those small towns for South Pacific waters and returned with a different sense of life and death. The Wayne County News and other local papers show a young pastor willing to drive into the countryside to conduct home funerals and services for people whose names seldom appear anywhere else in the historical record.
Conference journals and TSLA church records remind us that before he was a bishop he was a circuit pastor and district superintendent, tending congregations from Livingston and Lebanon to Belle Meade and Brentwood. The Council of Bishops and UMNews memorials remember a bishop chosen by his peers, who then used retirement not as a chance to disappear but as an opportunity to become chaplain to the people who printed hymnals and Sunday school literature, visiting them in the hospital and sending them notes in his ninety fifth year.
There is also the quieter Appalachian thread. As bishop of the Louisville Area, Spain presided over conferences that included the Red Bird Missionary Conference in the southeastern Kentucky mountains. As a director of the Magee Christian Education Foundation and in the naming of scholarship funds tied to Martin Methodist College and UT Southern, he helped channel resources toward Appalachian ministries and United Methodist college students in Tennessee.
If you stand in the research room at the Lawrence County Archives and pull the transcribed birth register for the 1920s, you can put your finger on his name. If you spool through TSLA microfilm of Loretto United Methodist Church records, you can likely follow the Spain family in baptism and membership rolls. With patience and a few database subscriptions you can find his wartime draft card and naval muster entries. In denominational journals and local newspapers you can watch him move from Loretto to Nashville, from pastor to bishop to chaplain.
Together these documents do not simply mark milestones. They testify that Bishop Robert H. Spain was, from beginning to end, a son of Lawrence County who carried the habits of a small town teacher’s household and a rural Methodist church into every role he held. The records preserve the outline. The lives he touched, in places like Loretto and Collinwood and Brentwood and the Red Bird hills, fill in the rest.
Sources and further reading
Lawrence County Archives, “Lawrence County Births 1920s–1930s,” transcription of birth registers including the entry “Spain, Robert Hitchcock; Spain, T. J.; Hitchcock, Grace; 10 26 25,” compiled from original county volumes and made available online through the archives. Lorettotel+2Lawrence County TN Government+2
Tennessee State Library and Archives, “Vital Records at the Library and Archives” and Tennessee Office of Vital Records guidance on birth records, which together explain where original Tennessee birth records and microfilmed county registers are held. SOS Tennessee+1
Tennessee State Library and Archives, “Church Records” guide, especially the entries for Loretto United Methodist Church Records, 1918–1971 (Mf. 481), First United Methodist Church, Lawrenceburg, and Belle Meade United Methodist Church Records, Nashville, whose registers document baptisms, marriages, membership rolls, pastors, and historical sketches for the congregations Spain and his family were part of or later served. Sostn Gov Buckets+1
Wayne County News obituary for Joseph D. Dunn, August 4, 1950, preserved in multiple genealogical projects including Wayne County TNGenWeb and Remembering the Shoals, noting that “Rev. Robert Spain, pastor of the Methodist church” conducted Dunn’s funeral at his home near Collinwood, a primary piece of evidence for Spain’s early pastoral work in Wayne County. TNGenWeb+3TNGenWeb+3Genealogy Trails+3
Additional obituaries and death notices from The Pulaski Citizen and other regional papers, now available through compiled obituary pages and digitized newspaper runs, that mention “Rev. Robert Spain of Nashville” officiating at funerals, confirming his ministry across Middle Tennessee in the 1960s and 1970s. Newspapers+3JParkes+3Aj Lambert+3
United Methodist Council of Bishops, press release “Bishop Robert H. Spain dies at age 96,” September 12, 2022, which summarizes his birth in Loretto, Navy medical corps service in the South Pacific, education at the University of Tennessee and University of North Alabama, pastoral appointments in Tennessee, election as bishop, assignments in Kentucky and South Carolina, and later years as chaplain at the United Methodist Publishing House. United Methodist Church+1
United Methodist News Service, Heather Hahn, “Bishop Spain, tireless counselor, dies at 96,” September 13, 2022, which portrays his long chaplaincy at the Publishing House, his care for staff and their families, and his ongoing ministry well into his nineties. United Methodist News Service
Williamson County Public Library, “Authors L through Z,” entry for Bishop Robert H. Spain, outlining his birth in Loretto, pre med study at the University of Tennessee, further education at the University of North Alabama, Scarritt College, and Vanderbilt, his pastorates at Livingston, Lebanon, Belle Meade, and Brentwood, and his episcopal assignments in Kentucky and South Carolina. Williamson County Public Library
Abingdon Press and associated listings for Spain’s books, including How to Stay Alive as Long as You Live: Practical Guides for Christian Living (1992) and Getting Ready to Preach (1996), with bibliographic information available through Google Books, Amazon, and other booksellers. Baker Book House+4Google Books+4Amazon+4
Asbury Theological Seminary, eCommons archive of Chapel Services, listing Spain’s 1989 sermon “An uncertain sound” as part of the chapel series, which serves as a primary audio and text source for his preaching style and theological emphases in the late twentieth century. ePLACE+1
Martin Methodist College and University of Tennessee Southern catalogues describing the Spain Scholarship Fund, established in 2001 to honor Bishop and Mrs. Robert Spain and awarded to students preparing for church related vocations, along with United Methodist Higher Education Foundation materials that track the scholarship’s impact and connect Spain’s name to ongoing support for Tennessee students. UMHEF+4UT Southern+4UT Southern+4
United Methodist Publishing House, “Bishop Robert H. Spain Retires as Chaplain to The United Methodist Publishing House,” August 24, 2017, which recounts his twenty five year chaplaincy, his “Chaplain’s Corner” writings, and his pastoral presence among UMPH staff and their families. UMPH+1
Magee Christian Education Foundation Form 990 PF filings, available through ProPublica and other nonprofit databases, which list “Bishop Robert H Spain, Brentwood TN” as a director and show his participation in a foundation that supported scholarships and ministries, including Appalachian related work. ProPublica+1