Beyond 'The Good Earth

 

Beyond 'The Good Earth': 5 Surprising Facts About the West Virginia Dynasty That Changed Global Literature

The mist-heavy silence of the Alleghenies in Pocahontas County, West Virginia, seems an improbable mirror to the teeming, river-side bustle of Zhenjiang on the Yangtze. Yet, the rugged landscape of the "Little Levels" served as the foundational sanctuary for a family of Dutch religious refugees whose lineage would eventually produce Pearl S. Buck—the first American woman to win both the Pulitzer and the Nobel Prize. Her birth in Hillsboro on June 26, 1892, occurred during a brief mission furlough, a temporary pause in a generational saga of displacement and conviction. To understand Buck’s legacy is to trace a miraculous historical trajectory: how a group of seceders fleeing a Dutch king became the architects of a West Virginian dynasty that shifted the world’s literary and humanitarian axis.

1. The "Magnificent Fanatic": A Life of Absolute Certainty and Personal Tragedy

The patriarch of this dynasty, Absalom Sydenstricker (1852–1931), was a man of unbending Calvinist duty. Immortalized as "Andrew" in Pearl S. Buck’s 1936 biography Fighting Angel, Absalom spent nearly fifty years in China as a pioneer of "itinerant evangelism." He possessed a formidable linguistic mastery, translating the New Testament into vernacular Mandarin (Baihua) to ensure the gospel reached the illiterate peasantry, rather than remaining the preserve of scholars.

However, this "magnificent" strength was inextricably linked to a profound family tragedy. Driven by a sense of divine mandate, Absalom frequently eschewed the relative safety of mission compounds for the dangerous interior. The cost of this spiritual asceticism was paid in blood: four of his seven children died of tropical diseases in China, victims of the primitive conditions he refused to abandon. Even during the 1927 Nanjing Incident, when he was evacuated to a U.S. gunboat under fire, his detachment remained absolute. To Absalom, the world was a temporary distraction from a predestined path.

"For this soul there was birth, predestined, a duty to be done and it was done, and there was heaven at the end – that was the whole story." — Pearl S. Buck, Fighting Angel

2. The Great Exodus: From the Afscheiding to the Williams River Experiment

The family's presence in Appalachia was born of a harrowing flight from the state-controlled church of the Netherlands. In 1834, the Stulting and VanReenan families joined the Afscheiding (Secession), a movement of orthodox Calvinists who rejected the liberal, Enlightenment-influenced doctrines mandated by King William I. Following the King’s 1816 reorganization of the church, traditional confessions were made optional, and state-commissioned hymns were forced upon the faithful.

The seceders faced systematic state-sanctioned crackdowns, including the criminalization of assemblies and "military billeting"—the practice of forcing dissenting households to lodge and feed royal soldiers as a form of intimidation. In 1847, this "exodus" led the families to the Allegheny Mountains. Their first attempt at settlement, the "Williams River Experiment" at a site known as "Dutch Bottom," was a failure. Unaccustomed to the grueling labor of dense spruce logging and the extreme isolation of the wilderness, they eventually migrated south to the fertile "Little Levels." It is a profound irony of history that these families, who fled state-controlled hymns in Utrecht, found their ultimate refuge in the rugged, limestone-rich soil of West Virginia, where their Reformed faith could finally flourish in the shadows of the mountains.

3. A House of Two Worlds: The Hybrid Architecture of the Stulting Homestead

Completed in 1858, the Pearl S. Buck Birthplace—known as the Stulting House—stands as a physical manifestation of this cultural collision. The twelve-room homestead is a rare example of hybrid design, blending Dutch urban design with American mid-19th-century architecture. The structure features hand-molded red brick walls that were, uniquely, encased in a white timber exterior frame. This European craftsmanship extended to a subterranean level, where four sandstone-lined basement rooms were designed for cold storage, mirroring traditional Dutch kitchen layouts.

For Pearl S. Buck, this house was more than a birthplace; it was a "sanctuary" of storytelling. Though she was raised in the interior of China, her mother, Carie Stulting, kept the West Virginia home alive through vivid, sensory-rich accounts. Carie’s "sanctuary storytelling" transformed the brick and timber of Hillsboro into a symbol of security and American freedom for a child living in a land of revolution. This spiritual anchor was reinforced by the nearby Oak Grove Presbyterian Church, built with the assistance of Nicholas Stulting, who repurposed bricks from the original 1830s site to ground the new sanctuary in town.

4. The Literary Reckoning: Converting Souls vs. Creating Empathy

The most enduring tension in the Sydenstricker lineage was the intellectual conflict between Pearl and her father. While Absalom viewed language as a utilitarian weapon for proselytization, Pearl came to see it as an empirical medium for human connection. She eventually rejected her father’s "spiritual imperialism"—which viewed non-Western cultures as "pagan" errors—in favor of the secular humanism she discovered in the Chinese oral tradition, or xiaoshuo.

The Clash of Visions: Absalom vs. Pearl

Goal	View of Language	Perspective on Culture
Absalom Sydenstricker	Proselytization and ideological conversion.	Instrumental; a tool for vernacular Mandarin translation.
Pearl S. Buck	Empathy and cross-cultural realism.	A bridge to the Chinese oral tradition (xiaoshuo).

Buck’s literary career was a deliberate move away from her father’s lofty, dogmatic pulpit. She chose instead the voice of the marketplace storyteller, replacing the desire to "save" the Chinese people with a commitment to portraying their inherent dignity.

"He was a magnificent fanatic... He never doubted that he knew the will of God, and that God's will was identical with his own." — Pearl S. Buck, Fighting Angel

5. The Cradle of Modern Activism: From Mission Outposts to Civil Rights

The "fanaticism" that drove Absalom to the Chinese interior did not disappear in the next generation; it was merely redirected toward secular justice. Buck’s upbringing as a minority in China, combined with her family’s history of dissent, fueled a lifetime of revolutionary advocacy. After returning to the U.S. in 1934, she became a prominent voice against "American Hypocrisy"—the gap between democratic ideals and Jim Crow segregation.

She served on the boards of the NAACP and the Urban League, but her most radical work was in the realm of interracial humanitarianism. In 1949, she founded Welcome House, the first international, interracial adoption agency, specifically to find homes for Amerasian children whom mainstream agencies deemed "unadoptable." In 1964, she established the Pearl S. Buck Foundation to support children in Asia fathered by American servicemen. Her activism was a direct evolution of the Sydenstricker stubbornness; she used her father’s unyielding energy to dismantle the very racial and religious barriers his generation had often helped to erect.

Conclusion: A Legacy Carved in Brick and Prose

Today, the 1858 Stulting House remains a monument to a complex and formidable lineage. It stands in the quiet Little Levels as a reminder of the stubborn Sydenstricker/Stulting coin: one side etched with the rigid Calvinism of a missionary who translated the New Testament into Mandarin, the other with the Nobel-winning prose of a daughter who translated the heart of the East for the West. One is left to wonder: was the same "fanaticism" that drove Absalom to the interior of China the very fuel that allowed Pearl S. Buck to challenge the social order of 20th-century America? In the end, her legacy is carved into both the red bricks of Hillsboro and the global history of human rights.