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

In 1817, by the legislation of the General Conference of 1816, the western field had four
Conferences: Ohio, with five districts, under Finley, Jacob and David Young, Moses Crume, and
Samuel Parker, Missouri, with two districts, under Samuel H. Thompson and Jesse Walker;
Tennessee, with six districts, under Marcus Lindsey, Thomas L. Douglass, John McGee, James
Axley, Jesse Cunningham, and John Henninger; and Mississippi, with two districts, under Thomas
Griffin and Ashley Hewitt. The ecclesiastical arrangements of the vast field remained thus, with
some local variations and a rapid multiplication of districts, circuits, preachers, and members, down
to the expiration of our present period, when the General Conference of 1820 created the Kentucky
Conference, with five districts, under John Brown, Alexander Cummins, Jonathan Stamper, Marcus
Lindsey, and Charles Holliday. Such was the geography of western Methodism in these years. We
are now prepared to look over it more in detail, though it must be with but glances. Extraordinary
triumphs of the gospel, and men of gigantic proportions, intellectual and moral, multiply too fast in
the grand arena for our space. They are produced by their great local circumstances. God always thus
provides what his people prepare themselves for. A Church or a State that projects great things
cannot fall to have great men. We descend, then, the western slope of the Alleghenies again to
witness achievements, wonders, seldom, if ever, paralleled in religious history great even in their
faults -- characters, labors, suffering; successes which molded young and semi-barbarous
communities that have since become mighty states, empires of Christian civilization, controlling,
in our day, the fate of the new world, and destined probably, before another century, to affect the
destinies of the whole world.
I have recorded the rapid outspread of Methodism in the ultra Allegheny regions of Pennsylvania,
the "Redstone country." It advanced victoriously there throughout the present period, blending on
the North with the southwestern appointments of the Genesee Conference; on the West with the
circuits of the itinerants from Kentucky, who were now ranging through nearly all the sparse
settlements of Ohio; on the South with the labors of the mountaineer itinerants of the Holston
country. It was still a single presiding elder's district successively under Fleming, James Hunter,
Gruber, Jacob Young, and Finley, and appertained to the distant Baltimore Conference down to
1812, when, the Ohio Conference having been organized, it was placed under the jurisdiction of the
latter. In 1820 its ample field was divided between the Genesee and the Ohio Conferences: two
circuits, the Chautauqua and Lake, belonging to the former, under the presiding eldership of Gideon
Draper, the remainder still belonging to the latter. This arrangement continued undisturbed till 1825,
when the Pittsburgh Conference was organized, comprehending all the appointments in two large
districts, the Erie and the Ohio. A renowned ecclesiastical body was this "old Pittsburgh Conference"
to become; thronged with notable men, constituting the chief northern stronghold of Methodism
between the East and the West, and yielding at last the Erie Conference on its north, and the Western
Virginia on its south.
Robert R. Roberts returned from his more eastward labors in the autumn of 1804, and traveled
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the Erie Circuit, placing his family again in his log-cabin in Chenango. His circuit required more
than four hundred miles travel every four weeks "along blind paths found by marked trees, across
swollen unbridged streams, over rugged precipices and high hills, now winding around steep, rocky
mountain sides, and then plunging through deep miry morasses; he sometimes camped in the woods
all night, wearied and hungry, resting his head upon the root of some forest tree, while his faithful
horse stood tied up without a mouthful to eat, and not infrequently he encountered wild beasts,