A Sketch of the Life of A. P. And Lillias Johnson

by Agnes Romie Johnson Meckfessel (also available in PDF) History records that in 1658 the extreme Southern part of Sweden was released from Denmark by the Treaty of Roskilde. It is recorded that at this time numerous families of noble birth and breeding settled in the valleys, building their castle-like homes, cultivating their fertile fields and raising their sleek cattle. Here for hundreds of years the lives of these people were ordered and stable, filled with a sort of peace and assurance. As the years went on, generation after generation, the families intermarried and the population spread out. Many families later drifted to the seacoast towns. The towns grew into cities. It was in the country where the great forests marched down to the placid lakes, abloom with water lilies, where stately beeches and feathery willows bordered the turbulent streams, that Andrew Peter Johnson was born. It was the year 1845, the date May 15. Perhaps the first sound he heard was the ecstatic twittering of birds which abounded in this land of lavender-tinted heather, rose-colored rhododendron, and sweet-scented yellow Honeysuckle. It may have been this beautiful environment where he first found himself that instilled in him the love so great for all nature that he always associated all things beautiful - whether it be a perfect flower, or a wave dashing on the rocks, breaking into a shower of diamond-like drops, with the Infinite. It was the happy songs of the birds he loved, intermingled with the faint tinkle of his Chinese wind harp that were the last sounds he heard when he died at his home in Sacramento, California one day after his eighty-ninth birthday on May 16, 1934. Read the rest of the story: http://www.eyelightmedia.org/andrew_peter_johnson.pdf