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Grant Colfax Tullar
1869 - 1950 Composer of "[Do your very best for Jesus]" in Ocean Grove Songs Grant Colfax Tullar was born August 5, 1869, in Bolton, Connecticut. He was named after the American President Ulysses S. Grant and Vice President Schuyler Colfax. After the American Civil War, his father was disabled and unable to work, having been wounded in the Battle of Antietam. Tullar's mother died when he was just two years old so Grant had no settled home life until he became an adult. Yet from a life of sorrow and hardship he went on to bring joy to millions of Americans with his songs and poetry.
As a child, he received virtually no education or religious training. He worked in a woolen mill and as a shoe clerk. The last Methodist camp meeting in Bolton was in 1847. Tullar became a Methodist at age 19 at a camp meeting near Waterbury in 1888.
He then attended the Hackettstown Academy in New Jersey. He became an ordained Methodist minister and pastored for a short time in Dover, Delaware. For 10 years he was the song leader for evangelist Major George A. Hilton. Even so, in 1893 he also helped found the well-known Tullar-Meredith Publishing Company in New York, which produced church and Sunday school music. Tullar composed many popular hymns and hymnals.
His works include: Sunday School Hymns No. 1 (Chicago, Illinois: Tullar Meredith Co., 1903) and The Bible School Hymnal (New York: Tullar Meredith Co., 1907). One of Grant Tullar's most quoted poems is "The Weaver":
My Life is but a weaving
Between my Lord and me;
I cannot choose the colors
He worketh steadily.
Oft times He weaveth sorrow
And I, in foolish pride,
Forget He sees the upper,
And I the under side.
Not til the loom is silent
And the shuttles cease to fly,
Shall God unroll the canvas
And explain the reason why.
The dark threads are as needful
In the Weaver's skillful hand,
As the threads of gold and silver
In the pattern He has planned.
He knows, He loves, He cares,
Nothing this truth can dim.
He gives His very best to those
Who chose to walk with Him.
Grant Tullar
--http://www.boltoncthistory.org/granttullar.html, from Bolton Community News, August 2006.
Grant Colfax Tullar
Flora Kirkland
Author of "Do Your Very Best" in Ocean Grove Songs Flora Kirkland was born in 1862 in Kentucky, before moving to Brooklyn, New York. After graduating from school she became a public school teacher for the seventh grade. She was a member of Tompkins Avenue Congregational Church for which she wrote a number of hymns. She was very active in the Wallabout Bay Mission in that neighborhood of Brooklyn. Most of Wallabout Bay would be filled in to make way for the Brooklyn Navy Yard. She died 17 January 1911.
Brooklyn Standard Union, 16 January 1911
Flora Kirkland
