James Axley

James Axley has left traditions of his character and work in the Church from Indiana to Louisiana. He was born on New River, Va., in 1776, removed, in childhood, to Kentucky, where he became a hunter and thrifty farmer, joined the Methodists in 1802, and in 1805 entered the itinerant ministry. He was tossed about, with singular rapidity, in his appointments, from Tennessee to Ohio, from Ohio to the Holston Mountains, from Holston to Opelousas, in Louisiana, back again to Holston, then to the Wabash District, in Indiana, back again to the Holston District for four years, thence to Green River District in Kentucky, and finally to French Broad District, among the Alleghenies of North Carolina. In 1822 he located, near Madisonville, Tenn., where he died in 1838. Through this vast range of his ministerial travels he was one of the most energetic, most popular, and most useful preachers of the times. His pulpit talents were not above mediocrity, his manners utterly unpolished; but he combined with profound piety and much tender sensibility the shrewdest sense, an astonishing aptness of speech, and an exhaustless humor.

From the HISTORY of the METHODIST EPISCOPAL CHURCH in the United States of America, VOLUME 4, BOOK 6,CHAPTER IX
METHODISM IN THE WEST, CONTINUED: 1804 — 1820, By Abel Stevens