A History Of The Rise Of Methodism In America - Media Sabda Org

When the old log chapel gave place to the stone house, in 1799, the stone in the end with the year
in which it was erected, was prepared by the hands of Mr. David Ford: -- the figures and letters
picked in a rough manner by him. His changing the name from "Cloud's Meeting House" to Bethel,
came near making considerable disturbance in the Society and neighborhood.
Mr. Harris, of Wilmington, Del., now (1860) in his eighty-fourth year, informed us that he saw
the corner stone of the first "Asbury Church" in Wilmington laid, in 1789: this year is the
seventy-first since that event. Mr. Harris was then a school boy, under the tuition of Mr. John
Thelwell, from Ireland, who was a Methodist of some note in Wilmington then. According to the
Minutes of Conference, the Rev. William Jessop was the stationed preacher in Wilmington in 1789;
and Henry Willis and Lemuel Green were Presiding Elders over the district, which then extended
from the Delaware river to Ohio. Mr. Harris remarked that the preacher who laid then corner stone
of Asbury Church knelt upon the stone, which was laid in a large deep hole which had been dug for
the purpose, and offered up prayer. This, with singing a hymn, constituted the religious service of
the occasion.
On page 163, [Chapter 25, paragraph 2 -- DVM] in the account of the introduction of Methodism
into Tuckeyhoe Neck, Caroline county, Maryland, by the Rev. Freeborn Garrettson, it is stated that
he first preached "at the house of the step-father of the late Rev. Ezekiel Cooper." We have lately
been informed Mr. Ezekiel Coopers mother married for her second husband Mr. Nathan Downs, who
was brother to Mr. Henry Downs, who was sheriff of Caroline county about this time, and kept the
Rev. Thomas Chew prisoner in his house long enough to make Methodists of himself and his wife.
Mr. Nathan Downs was a military man at the time of the introduction of Methodism into this Neck;
and, it was to the company of soldiers which he commanded, and others, that Mr. Garrettson
preached on this first visit to this Neck.
On page 227, [Chapter 34, paragraph 4 -- DVM] in the account of the Rev. Freeborn Garrettson
in the region of the Cypress Swamp, in Sussex Co., Del., being lost, and about to take up his
lodgings on ground; but, seeing a light, he made for it, and found a family where he was entertained:
the name of the gentleman whose wife had passed through such a strange experience, in that dark
time, as we lately learned at Captain Lewis, near Laurel, Del., was Fookes: some of his descendants
are still living in the west margin of the Cypress Swamp.
Captain Kendall Lewis, a native of Dorchester county, Maryland, who was born in 1771, and is
now in 1860, in his eighty-ninth year, informed us a few months since, when at his house near
Laurel, Sussex county, Delaware, who some of the men were who undertook to conduct Mr.
Garrettson to jail, as stated on page 251: their names were Richard Stanford, who acted as a foreman,
-- Jacob Staten, a tailor, and Roger McCallister: these men belonged to Hurley's Neck, below
Vienna, on the Nanticoke river; Mr. Lewis, according to our recollection, is also a native of this
Neck. In it lived John and Thomas Beard, who were some of the first Methodists in Dorchester
county; and it appears that Mr. Garrettson had been preaching in the house of one of the Beard's at
the time of his arrest by the mob. These men soon saw their error, and some, if not all of them,
became Methodists. In 1780, young Kendall Lewis, when nine years old, heard the Rev. Joseph
Everett preach at Thomas Beard's -- and he was the first Methodist preacher he ever heard: he still