Nathan Lorenza Haston was born in Van Buren County, TN in 1849.  His parents were Wiley B. and Mary Durham Haston.  Nathan Lorenza was a Great Grandson Daniel Haston.  His father, Wiley B., was 20 years old when Daniel died so Nathan Lorenza would have heard many stories about the early Haston family.   
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When Nathan Lorenza was about 10 years old, his parents moved the family to Arkansas.  Apparently, they stopped in Yell County, AR for a while, where his younger brother, Willard Durham Haston, was born.  They moved to the western edge of the state, Sebastian County, AR, where their father died, leaving wife Mary with several children, six of whom were under the age of 15.

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Mary must have felt overwhelmed–now a widow with a bunch of children, living about 600 miles away from her Durham family and many friends back in Tennessee!  By the time of the 1870 census, almost ten years after the death of her husband, Mary was living back in Van Buren County, TN, with her kids.  We don’t know how long she was in Arkansas after her husband died, but I’m guessing it wasn’t long before she left Arkansas for home in Tennessee.

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But some of the kids, Nathan Lorenza, David S., and Willard Durham Haston, had not forgotten their father’s dream of living west of the Mississippi River, Arkansas specifically.  At the time of the 1880 census, N.L. and his Arkansas-born wife, Mary Theodosia (George), were living in Yell County, AR, with Nathan Lorenza’a brothers D.S. (age 23) and Wm. D. (age 20) in their household.

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Unfortunately, there are no (known to me) records of when Nathan Lorenza became a Freewill Baptist preacher.  But when the Freewill Baptists launched missionary work among the native American nations in the Oklahoma Territory (see below), Nathan Lorenza and brother Willard Durham Haston joined the Freewill Baptist missionary venture among the Chickasaw and other Indian nations of the Oklahoma Territory in approximately 1890.  Perhaps they were influenced by the ministry of J.M. Roberts and R.J. townsend, who were Freewill Baptists ministering in Arkansas until about 1884.  

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Nathan Lorenza’s missionary work was cut short by his death in 1897.  But his missionary brother, Willard Durham Haston, continued in ministry among the Chickasaw Indians in Johnston County, OK until about 1905 (or early 1906) when he moved to Cottle County, TN.  More about Elder W.D. Haston in another article.