Potter was essentially raised by a rough-and-tumble horse racing crowd after his father died in 1840, when Andrew was seven. He enlisted in the Army to fight in the Mexican War and later prospected for gold in California, and worked as a freighter in San Antonio. For a time, he was a regular in the little Bastrop County community of Alum Creek, where he spent his Sundays drinking, fighting and gambling in front of the local store.
One of his running buddies at the time was Noah Smithwick, who later wrote the seminal "Evolution of a State," one of the best first-hand account of frontier Texas ever written. Smithwick, who was something of a rounder in his day, was a tamer sort than Potter, as were most other people.
For Smithwick, a turning point in their friendship came when Smithwick felt obliged to help the ringleader in sin take on a dozen or so men in a fight that turned out badly for Potter and Smithwick. Physically, both men took a beating. Smithwick soon took himself to a camp revival meeting where he saw the light and vowed to change his wicked ways.
Andy Potter was crushed. "I had lost my strongest brother in sin," he later said. Potter blamed all those meddling preachers at the revival meeting for the change in his friendship with Smithwick. He attended the next camp revival meeting, up to no good, but rather than disrupt the proceedings, he too was converted to the Christian way of life. Never one to do things halfway, Potter studied hard to become a preacher despite having had very little formal education.
Potter served as a soldier and a chaplain during the Civil War. Stationed at Camp Verde in Kerr County in 1862, he became the first Methodist minister to preach in Bandera. His Army duty included guarding prisoners of war, but his biggest challenge came from the regiment's bully, whose description and demeanor might remind modern readers of Brutus in the old Popeye cartoons. The bully hated religion and especially those who espoused it. He gave chaplain Potter a lot of opportunities to turn the other cheek.
Once, after Potter overheard the lout cast false aspersions on his character, he confronted the bully and said, "Sir, you are a liar, and if you take that, you're a coward." The bully came after Potter but the reverend pushed him away and said, "You won't fight." As it turned out, he was right. The man settled down considerably after that and the grateful men of the regiment demanded that Potter be made regimental chaplain, and it came to pass.
After the war, he was appointed as a circuit rider by the West Texas Conference of the Methodist Church. He headed into that untamed and often lawless frontier armed with a pistol, a Bible and an iron will of purpose that he had possessed long before his conversion. He was the first Methodist preacher to preach in Bandera and writer J. Marvin Hunter Hunter recalled how, when Andy Potter came to preach, even horse races and dances were called off and everybody went to church. "Protracted meetings were often held, always well-attended, always earnest and orderly, but it was hard to get up a great revival. Parson Potter said it was no use to tell these people of Paradise; they wanted no place better than Bandera," Hunter wrote.
Potter was called "The Fighting Parson" and he was more than willing to fight the drunken louts who came to heckle him, but he insisted on doing his preaching first. That he meant to keep order during his sermon was illustrated with a six-gun and a rifle, which he kept within easy reach, just in case. His son, T.W. Potter, said his father was called The Fighting Parson because "he stayed when other preachers had been scared away."
In 1883, Potter moved his family to San Angelo, but he continued riding the circuit, leaving his wife, Emily, to raise the couple's 14 children. Parson Potter died at the pulpit, in the middle of a sermon, in Caldwell in 1895.
