Rev. Robert Fulton Bass
Robert Fulton Bass was born on 6 June 1880 at Bunker Hill, a farming community in Marion County, in the longleaf pine country of south Mississippi. Columbia, on the Pearl River, is the county seat.
By 1904 he had married Florence Elizabeth Bozeman, who was born on 28 April 1884 in neighbouring Lawrence County. Their children came over the next fifteen years. Robert Olouse Bass was born in 1904, Ronald Steven Bass, called Mack, on 30 June 1906 in Marion County, Emily Mae on 9 February 1908 at Columbia, and Shelby E. Bass on 6 November 1909. Sarah, called Sadie, followed on 18 September 1915, and Ella Louise, called Bobbye, on 18 September 1918 at Bolivar in Bolivar County, in the Mississippi Delta. Two more sons, Joseph and Paul, lived to old age.
He became a Baptist minister and for a time held the pulpit of the Baptist church at Columbia, the Marion County seat. That church had been organized in 1883 by the pastor of the Bunker Hill church, in the community where he was born. His gravestone gives him the title Reverend. It is carved as the trunk of a tree with its branches lopped off, the shape the Woodmen of the World gave its members' graves. The Woodmen was a fraternal society that insured the lives of its members, and in its early years it paid for a member's monument. The seal on the trunk reads "Woodmen of the World Memorial." A shield below it carries his name and dates and two lines of verse: "Here I lay my burden down. Change the cross into the crown."
Robert died on 25 November 1921, aged forty one. He was no longer preaching at Columbia by then. Two weeks later a round-up of state news carried a one-line item from Columbia: "News received here of death of Rev. R. F. Bass, who formerly occupied the pulpit of the Baptist Church here." Florence was left a widow at thirty seven with young children, Bobbye only three. She lived another forty nine years and was still Florence E. Bass when she died. He is buried in the Old Bunker Hill Cemetery, where Florence was laid beside him in 1970.
Their children scattered. Mack stayed in Marion County, raised cattle, kept a tung oil farm and was a deacon of the East Columbia Baptist Church. Shelby went to California, settled at Highland in San Bernardino County and ran an auto top shop there for many years. Emily Mae married John McGinnis and lived at Mobile, Sadie married Worth Tullos of the Spring Cottage community, and Bobbye married Bruce Byrd and lived at Pensacola. Joe went to Houston and Paul to the Virginia and West Virginia coal country.
A framed photograph of a young man in a buttoned jacket, a white flower and a ribbon badge pinned to his lapel and one hand resting on a wicker stand of ferns, has been shared by the family as his likeness.
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If Rev. Robert Fulton Bass is in your family, start your own tree.
Cite: Heirology, "Rev. Robert Fulton Bass (1880-1921)", https://heirology.com/ancestors/rev-robert-fulton-bass-1880-1921-19ed53.