The first term of school taught by William McKinley, Jr., was in the Kerr District, about four miles from Poland, where he presided over the studies of nearly half a hundred pupils through the winter months of 1859–60. With the money secured he not only assisted in defraying the expenses of his sisters and brother at the academy, for which they were by this time prepared, but he was enabled to enter Alexander College, in the autumn of 1860. Two years before that date he had united with the Methodist Church, and had been received into full communion with the society of that denomination in Poland. And through all the years of his life, to the very end, he maintained that relation. In his later years he had been a regular attendant at the forms of worship, a frequent guest at the conferences of his church; and his counsels have been continually at the service of those high in the management of the affairs of Methodism. It is told of him with a good deal of interest that in the years following the revival at which his conversion was confessed, he was at once a consistent Christian and a happy young man. He delighted in healthful sports, in games which tested muscle, skill and endurance, and took the heartiest possible interest in life. Those were the years under the calm guidance of the wise mother, when stores of power were laying up against the day of need that should come as manhood brought its duties. He was passing through his formative period under the most normal and healthy conditions possible. And that was the best preparation for the broad requirements, the heavy burdens which the future was to lay upon him. His brother Abner has said that William was a general favorite; that he had no enemies. And one can well believe it, for throughout his adult life he has gone with friends. No one ever hated him. No one ever received an affront at his hands. There is a foolish adage that a man is weak and inconsequential who makes no enemies; that such a character can not be positive, yet that would be a perverse or an ill-informed man who would say William McKinley was either weak or of the negative type of life. And as he has been in manhood, so he was in the early days about the town of Poland. He knew all the workmen in the iron mills, and all the farmers for miles around. He understood them perfectly, and the bond of sympathy for them which was planted in his breast while yet a lad was one of the guides by which he shaped legislation when he came to be a man. His boyish frankness and simplicity and generosity remained permanent traits in his character to the end.