Bishop A. Coke Smith

There’s a story, and I can’t find the citation this morning, that a man had moved from Columbia to Spartanburg in the late 19^th century, but was shortly thereafter seen on the streets of Columbia.  When a friend inquired why he was back in the capital city, the man replied that to live in Spartanburg, one had to accept three things as fact, that Wofford College was the greatest  educational institution since Oxford, that Dr. James Carlisle, Wofford’s president, was the greatest astronomer since Copernicus, and that Wofford professor Coke Smith was the greatest pulpit orator since Saint Paul.  And he’d be darned if he could accept them all! 

Alexander Coke Smith may not have been the greatest pulpit orator since Paul, but he must have been pretty good, because within two years of his graduation from Wofford, he had been assigned to Washington Street Methodist Church in Columbia, which, despite its encounter with fire in 1865, was arguably the most important Methodist pulpit in the most important city in the Conference. 

Born in Lynchburg, in Sumter County, in 1849, Coke Smith was the son of The Rev. William H. Smith, a member of the South Carolina Annual Conference.  He studied at Wofford from 1868 to 1872, and after his graduation, he taught in the Reidville, SC high school for a term.  He joined the South Carolina Conference in December 1872 and was appointed to the church in Cheraw.  The next year, he was sent to Washington Street Church in Columbia, where he served for three years.  This was quite a leap for someone who was so new in the ministry, for Washington Street was (and remains) a large and influential congregation.  At the end of 1876, he was sent to Greenville, where he served Buncombe Street Church for four years.  He then went to Trinity in Charleston, serving for three years, and at that point, he was made the presiding elder for the Columbia District.  Before he had passed his 32^nd birthday, he had been appointed to large churches in three of the state’s largest cities, and had met with success in each appointment. 

In 1884, he was named to fill a vacancy on Wofford’s board of trustees, and in 1886, when Wofford professor William Wallace Duncan was elected a bishop, Smith was elected to fill his chair on the Wofford faculty.  At the same time, the trustees voted to relieve Smith of the teaching obligations that came with being Professor of Mental and Moral Philosophy, the chair to which he had just been named, so that he might work on behalf of the college in the churches around the state.  By the 1880s, it had become common for one of the faculty members to act as financial agent of the college, serving essentially as the college’s development officer.  W. W. Duncan did this, as did Coke Smith, and later, John C. Kilgo.  All three were effective in raising funds and promoting the college to Methodists in the state, and each man used his position to launch himself to an even higher position in the church hierarchy.  Smith also served as the college’s treasurer, handling much of the institution’s business. 

After four years at Wofford, Smith was elected one of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South’s missionary secretaries by the General Conference.  He left that position quickly to take a professorship  of practical theology at Vanderbilt’s divinity school.  After two years, he moved back into the local church, but this time, in Virginia.  He served in the Old Dominion until his election as a bishop in 1902.  He actually came close to being elected in 1898, and in 1891 and 1901, he had attended the great ecumenical conferences.  It's unfortunate that his time in the episcopacy was actually quite short, for he died in Asheville, NC in December 1906.