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Rev. Hosea Vise, a pioneer minister of the Missionary Baptist Church, was born in 1811 in Spartansburg County, S. C., the seventh of nine children (seven deceased) of Nathaniel and Darcus (Meadows) Vise, the former of Welsh descent, born in 1773 in North Carolina, the latter of English stock, a descendant of Pocahontas, and born in 1778 in North Carolina. The parents went to Spartansburg County, S. C., when children, and there were reared, married and lived on the farm until their deaths in 1857. The Grandfather Vise fought in the Revolution, at Eutaw Springs and Guilford C. H., in the Carolinas, and was a member of the Virginia Blues with Col. Washington at the defeat of Gen. Braddock on the Monongahela River, and died in 1883 at the age of one hundred and three. The mother's father lived to the age of one hundred and seven.

With the ordinary education of his native county, after the autumn of 1835, he went to Posey County, Ind., but soon went to Hamilton County, Ill., and began clearing his farm and expounding the gospel to the pioneers in early "Egypt," until in 1864 he established his store at Macedonia. In 1861 he enlisted in Company D, Sixth Illinois Cavalry, and served as captain for nineteen months, when he was honorably discharged at La Grange, Tenn. Since 1864 he has been a farm superintendent, merchant and minister. Twenty years of this time he has been a notary public, twelve years postmaster, and ten years pension agent.

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Since 1871, when he sold and bought in Franklin County, Northern Township, he has lived here. His wife, Lettie, daughter of Ebsworth and Elizabeth (Smith) Moore, of South Carolina, was born in 1814 in our subject's native county, and died in October, 1886, at his present home. Their five children are deceased. Our subject, always a many-handed man, is still a robust man of seventy-six years, and a minister for forty-eight years, who has failed in but four appointments. He has presided in the Franklin Association for thirty-three sessions, and has missed but two meetings since its organization, and those were while he was in the war. He delivered the first temperance lecture given in Franklin or Hamilton Counties. He has assisted in the organization of more churches than any other minister in these counties, and even now is pastor of the oldest Baptist Church in this part of the State. Before the second election of Lincoln our subject was a Democrat, and then, until 1884, a Republican, but in the last election voted for St. John. His first vote was for Jackson. He is a demitted member of the Masonic order, Gov. Yate's Military Lodge.