Reuben Houston Burrow, the outlaw, was born in Lamar County, December 11, 1854. His early life in Lamar was an uneventful one. He was known as an active, sprightly boy, apt in all athletic pursuits, a swift runner, an ardent huntsman and a natural woodsman. He possessed a fearless spirit, was of a merry and humorous turn, a characteristic of the Burrow family, but he developed none of those traits which might have foreshadowed the unenviable fame acquired in after-life. James Buchanan Burrow, the fifth and youngest son, was born in 1858, and was, therefore, four years the junior of his brother Rube, to whose fortunes his own were linked in the pursuit of train robbing, and which gave to the band the name of the “Burrow Brothers” in the earliest days of its organization. The facilities for acquiring education in the rural districts of the South, half a century ago, were limited, and Allen Burrow grew to manhood’s estate, having mastered little more than a knowledge of the “three R’s,” and yet talent for teaching the young idea how to shoot was so scant that Allen Burrow, during the decade immediately preceding the late war, was found diversifying the pursuits of tilling the soil with that of teaching a country school. Among his pupils was the unfortunate postmaster of Jewell, Ala., Moses Graves, who was wantonly killed by Rube Burrow in 1889. Many anecdotes are current in Lamar County, illustrating the primitive methods of pedagogy as pursued by Allen Burrow. It is said that the elder Graves, who had several sons as pupils, withdrew the hopeful scions of the Graves household from the school for the reason that after six months’ tuition, he having incidentally enrolled the whole contingent in a spelling bee, they all insisted on spelling every monosyllable ending with a consonant by adding an extra one, as d-o-g-g, dog; b-u-g-g, bug.