B. F. (Benjamin Franklin) Riley

Born in Pineville, Alabama, in 1849, Benjamin Franklin Riley grew up with limited early schooling before earning a degree from Erskine College and studying at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary and Crozer Theological Seminary. He was ordained in 1872 and went on to serve as a Baptist pastor in several Alabama churches.

Riley combined church leadership with teaching and public writing. He served as president of Howard College in Birmingham and later taught at the University of Georgia. Over time he became known as a prolific author whose books documented Baptist history in Alabama, Texas, and the broader South, while also exploring Alabama's past in works such as History of Conecuh County, Alabama and Makers and Romance of Alabama History.

He died in 1925. Today, Riley is remembered less as a novelist than as a minister-scholar whose books preserve a detailed, revealing picture of Southern religious and regional history at the turn of the twentieth century.