General Mark P. Lowrey: AKA “The Fighting Parson” and “The Preacher General”

Mark Perrin Lowry, son Adam and Margaret Doss Lowrey, was born December 29,1828, in McNairy County, Tennessee. He was one of eleven children left fatherless when Adam Lowrey died on a trip to market in New Orleans. When M. P. Lowrey was fifteen, the family moved to Farmington, Mississippi, a village four miles from the present town of Corinth, and it was here that sources say he learned the trade of brick-laying.  Lowrey volunteered for service during the Mexican War, but neither he nor his regiment was in battle. When seccession came and Mississippi called out state troops, Lowrey enlisted for sixty days of service, despite his position as a Baptist minister in Kossuth, and was elected captain of his company. Following the sixty-day service, he reluctantly consented to raise a regiment (32nd Mississippi), of which he was chosen colonel. The regiment was assigned to Wood's Brigade of Hardee's Division and was in battle at Perryville, Kentucky, where Lowrey was wounded, at Murfreesboro and other engagements in middle Tennessee, and in the Georgia Campaign.

On October 4, 1863 at the age of 35 Mark Lowrey was promoted to a Brigadier General. It was because of his evangelistic ties and preaching that he came to be known as the "Preacher General". While in the army, he took part in a religious revival, and baptized 50 men in one two-week period in the spring of 1864.  In December 1864 during the Franklin-Nashville Campaign an officer saw the flash of an enemy gun and yelled to Lowrey, who quickly lowered himself and the bullet stuck and killed a man behind him. Years of bad health and other reasons caused Lowrey to resign his commission as a brigadier general on March 14, 1865, almost one month before the Confederate forces surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse. Maj. Gen. Patrick Cleburne, Lowrey's divisional commander during the Franklin-Nashville Campaign, pronounced Lowrey "the bravest man in the Confederate Army.”

During the War , General Lowrey, , was believed by the Federals to be at home for a visit. His capture was considered a necessity by the enemy. Thus the enemy detached some soldiers to check it out, and as they reined in their horses at the big gate, which was a distance from the house. There they met Modena Lowrey, the oldest child in the family, setting upon a log just inside the gate. Modena Lowrey left us her account of the event.

“A company of Yankees from Corinth had been located in Kossuth to forage for food for the invaders. One night when we children were all asleep, my father came to the window by my mother’s bed and called to her to open the door for him. Thinking that he was in or near Tupelo and knowing that the enemy was then in sight of our home, Mother was both confused and frightened; but she got up and let him in and carried him upstairs where he stayed for two days and two nights. He would not risk letting any of us children know that he was at home. Mother told us after the close of the war that Father came downstairs and looked at us all in bed asleep and kissed the babies, but was afraid to touch us older ones for fear we might awake. “The second day, while we children were playing in front of the house, three or four Yankee soldiers came dashing up to us and said to me, the oldest, ‘Sissie, where is your father?’ I said, ‘He’s in the army killing Yankees.’ He said, ‘No, he’s not, he’s right up yonder in that house,’ pointing to our residence. I said, ‘He’s not there.’ He said, ‘When did you see him?’ and I told him truthfully just when I had seen him last. He saw from my countenance that I was telling the truth, so they all turned their horses and rode away, thinking they had been misinformed about my father’s being at home, seeing the truth in my eyes and tone. I thought I was telling the truth, but I was not. I did not know that he was nearer than Tupelo. “After the close of the war, Father and Mother told me all this and how they trembled as those Yankees talked to me, fearing they would come into the house and capture Father. Father slipped away that night as soon as it was dark and went back to his army in Tupelo. ”

He resigned his commission in March of 1865, and returned to his ministry, and wrote for "The Christian Index," a religious newspaper. In 1873 General Lowrey established “Blue Mountain College” in Mississippi and Modena would have a remarkable part in that institution and in the lives of a multitude of young Southern Ladies.

Following several years of teaching at the Blue Mountain College Lowrey became very sick and in 1882 his doctors alerted him that his heart was very weak. Then on February 27, 1885, while buying a train ticket at Middleton, Tennessee, he turned, gasped, and fell to the floor dead.