A Thousand Weddings

Born at the dawn of the twentieth century, Hope Hart's life spanned a dynamic period in American history, particularly in the South. As the daughter of Sterling Hart, a traveling Methodist minister from Weakley County in northwest Tennessee, Hope's early years were shaped by her father's work preaching and performing wedding ceremonies across Tennessee, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Arkansas. Throughout her childhood, Hart witnessed the last days of the nineteenth-century Methodist circuit riders a