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

are reported from Flint Circuit. The South Carolina Conference of 1811 ceases to report Tombigbee
Circuit; but it reappears, in the Mississippi District, with one hundred and forty members, under the
jurisdiction of the Western Conference. Alabama thus passes definitively into the ecclesiastical
geography of the West, but with it went a company of strong South Carolina preachers, at whose
head, as presiding elder, was Dunwody. His Mississippi District was to become, in the Minutes of
1817, the Mississippi Conference. Gibson, as we have seen, had reached the still remoter Southwest
by the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers, and in 1812 a band of four young evangelists departed from
South Carolina, on horseback, for the distant fields of Mississippi and Louisiana. They were
Richmond Nolley, Lewis Hobbs, Drury Powell, and Thomas Griffin. We shall have occasion to
notice after their adventures in the far southwest.
Of the host of able men whom we have heretofore seen in the southern itinerancy, most were yet
abroad, and still in their prime vigor; others, who have not yet come under our notice, were now
mighty in labors, and still others, of later historical prominence, were about to appear.
Lewis Myers was rising into notice by his character if not his talents; a small but sturdy
Dutchman, of Herculean energy, of habitual humor, mixed with Spartan severity; a man of few
words, but those always directly to the point; a considerable reader, a pupil of Hope Hull's academy,
and a close student of the Bible; eccentric and rough and formidable, yet of such real tenderness of
heart that he seldom preached without tears. Through a ministry of a quarter of a century he had a
hand in almost all the hardest work of the Church in the low country of Georgia and South Carolina.
No man was more resolute to confront labor or suffering in the common cause; he therefore became
a leader in his Conference, and, on the floor of the General Conference, he was respected for his
strong practical sense, and admired for his loyal devotion to the Church. "He belonged," says a
bishop of Southern Methodism, "to a class of men of heroic mold, who could take the saddle, face
a day's hard rain, swim swollen creeks, live in the cabins of the poor, eat bear-meat, if necessary, and
preach without manuscript every day of the week; who went girded into the great battlefield where
ignorance, vice, and semi-barbarism were to be confronted, and fought a good, honest fight, very
different from the sham-battles of holiday heroes. He was a man of weight in the Conference, well
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versed in affairs, of sound judgment, and looked up to with universal respect." He died in 1851,
a patriarch of the South, having been connected with the ministry a full half century, though about
half the time in a superannuated relation, a sufferer from spasmodic asthma, brought on by his
itinerant exposures and labors.
William M. Kennedy began his career at the beginning of this period. Born in 1783, in that part
of South Carolina which was ceded to Tennessee in 1790, he had the early hardy training of the
western mountains. He lived some years in South Carolina, and at last in Georgia, where, in 1803,
he was brought into the Church under the ministry of Hope Hull. Joining the South Carolina
Conference of 1805, he filled its most important appointments for more than thirty years, half of the
time as presiding elder. In 1839 he was struck with apoplexy; his Conference placed him on its
superannuated list, but he continued to labor. "I wish," he exclaimed, "the messenger of death to find
me at my Master's work." Traveling in the service of the Church, he was suddenly struck down by
another attack of his malady at the foot of a large oak in Newburgh District, S. C., and died in 1840,
lamented as one of the noblest men of Southern Methodism. He was nearly six feet high, robust, with
a large head, an intellectual front, an expressive eye, dark complexion, features radiant with