History of the M.E. Church, Vol. IV - Media Sabda Org

Methodism was therefore now not only founded, but fortified, in all the principal communities
of the South. Meanwhile it spread prevailingly through the interior towns and settlements. It had long
been tending toward the southwest. Early in the period it penetrated into Alabama, where it was
destined to become the predominant religious power. The noted Lorenzo Dow had wandered into
[3]
this wilderness in 1803, and was there also in 1804. The historian of the state a knowledge that he
[4]
preached the first Protestant sermon delivered on its soil. Louisiana, ceded to the United States
under Jefferson's administration, reached as far eastward as the Perdido River. The Indian title to
some of the eastern lands was extinguished, and we early hear of white settlements on Tensas,
Tombigbee, Buckatano, and Chickasaw. It was to these frontier and semi-barbarous pioneers that
Dow heralded Methodism. In 1807 Asbury called, in the South Carolina Conference, at Charleston,
for missionaries to this then far western field, and among the appointments to the Oconee District,
traveled by Josiah Randle, is Tombigbee Circuit, with Matthew P. Sturdevant as preacher. Randle
District must have been immense and perilous, for between the Oconee, from which it took its name
[5]
and the Tombigbee Circuit, lay an Indian country of four hundred miles extent. The next year
Tombigbee still appears in the Minutes, with Michael Burdge and Sturdevant as preachers, but the
latter bears the title of "missionary," implying, probably, that he was to push to "regions beyond."
At the end of this second year they report eighty-six Church-members, the germ of all the subsequent
growth of Alabama Methodism. In 1809 John W. Kennon and Burdge were the whole itinerant force
of the field. Their labor was hard and their success slow; but they returned to the Conference in 1811,
reporting one hundred and sixteen members.
Meanwhile itinerants from Tennessee were entering the northeastern portions of the country.
About the year 1807 the Indian title to the region north of the Tennessee River, bounded on the east
by Flint River, on the west by Indian Creek, and reaching to the Tennessee boundary line, was
extinguished, and in 1808 Madison County was organized. It was reached by the Elk (Tenn.) Circuit,
and the next year we read the title of "Flint Circuit," with no less than one hundred and seventy
Methodists, to whom the Conference, assembled in Cincinnati, sent Jedediah McMinn as preacher.
Thus the itinerants of the Southeast and the far West met on the new field of Alabama. In 1811 the
western preachers at the North, and those of South Carolina at the South, returned an aggregate of
about four hundred communicants in the country. The labors and sufferings of the earliest evangelist
were as severe as any endured in the history of the Church, but they are unrecorded, and known now
only by fragmentary traditions. John S. Ford, who was sent with Kennon to Tombigbee Circuit in
1810, relates that from the time they set out from the settlements in Georgia till they reached Fort
Claiborne, on the Alabama River, they had to sleep under the trees thirteen nights. They carried their
own provisions, except what they could occasionally obtain from the Indians, till they arrived among
the whites on Bassett's Creek, now in Clark County. Here their circuit began, and crossing the
Tombigbee at old Fort St. Stevens, continued thence up the Buckatano over to Chickasakay, and
back through the Tensas, settlements to Bassett's Creek. In the South Carolina Conference of 1810
Asbury called for volunteers for regions far beyond what was then called "the wilderness." The latter,
for that day, was the country from the Ocmulgee River to near the Alabama. Beyond this lay still
another "wilderness" of the Chickasaw and Choctaw Indians, and still beyond the latter lay the field
to which the itinerants now began to move.
In 1811 the Western Conference, at Cincinnati, sent Thomas Stilwell and David Goodner to
Richland and Flint, and at the close of the ecclesiastical year three hundred and forty-eight members