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

Benjamin Lakin, Samuel Doughty John Adam Grenade, Lewis Garrett, William Crutchfield,
Benjamin Young, Ralph Lotspeich, Anthony Houston, and some few more not now recollected.
These were members of the great Western Conference, comprehending Kentucky, Ohio,
Southwestern Virginia, old Tennessee, and the Mississippi territory. This year they sent missionaries
to Illinois and Indiana. In a beautiful grove, a mile from Mr. Coleman's, they erected up a stand, and
seats to accommodate a congregation. The Conference adjourned every day, that the preachers might
attend public services. As I was not in full connection I had no seat in the Conference; but I was free
to go and come as I pleased. We kept up prayer-meetings nearly all the time. There was a great deal
of good preaching during the session, and I have no doubt but much good was done at that time.
There was an extensive revival all through Kentucky. On Sabbath Bishop Asbury preached one of
his masterly sermons to about ten thousand listeners. This was a very solemn and profitable day. On
Tuesday I was appointed to preach. The congregation was still very large, and the cross was heavy.
I mounted the stand in my rough costume; every eye was fixed upon me. My voice was both strong
and clear. I preached upward of two hours, and wound up with a pleasant gale. Many of the preachers
hung around me and wept, and bade me Godspeed. It seemed as if the whole assembly wanted to
shake hands with me. I sat long in the pulpit weeping and praising God. These were days of the Son
of God with me."
His appointment was to Clinch Circuit, where he had many a romantic encounter. In the last year
of our present period he was traveling the Holston Mountains, where we must leave him, but to meet
him often hereafter, for he is henceforth to be one of the chief heroes of Western Methodism, from
Ohio to Mississippi, and to survive most of his itinerant compeers.
In 1802 a very striking appointment appears on the roll of the Western Conference, that of
"Natchez," with the solitary name of Tobias Gibson attached as preacher. Natchez, however, was
obscurely recorded, with Gibson's name, two years earlier, as on the Georgia District, which fact only
made the record appear the more extraordinary, for the immense territories which are now the two
large states of Alabama and Mississippi, lay between Georgia and this point on the Mississippi
River. The remote appointment appeared as a new sign in the far off Southern heavens; to the
pioneer preachers of Kentucky and Tennessee it was as the constellation of the cross to mariners in
the Southern Seas. It opened a boundless prospect of progress; and the word Natchez sounded like
a new order of march to the itinerants and their cause -- that march which they have since made over
Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, even to the Pacific boundary of California.
Tobias Gibson was worthy of the pioneer mission, and was soon worthily to fall a martyr to his
heroism, but not without opening the way, never to be closed, for the southwestern triumphs of the
Church. He was a saintly man, of vigorous intellect, "greatly given to reading, meditation, and
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prayer;" very "affectionate and agreeable" in his manners. He was born in Liberty County,
Georgia, in 1771, where he owned a valuable patrimony, which he forsook for the gospel. Joining
the itinerancy in his twenty-second year, he traveled for eight years large circuits, mostly in the far
South, but one of them, as early as 1795, among the Holston Mountains. We have heretofore seen
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him encountering with Asbury formidable hardships. In 1799 he volunteered to go to the distant
southern banks of the Mississippi, though he was already broken in health by excessive labors and
privations. With the approval of Asbury he started alone, and made his way on horseback to the
Cumberland River, in Kentucky, traveling hundreds of miles through the wilderness, mostly along