trees waiting patiently when to their surprise They heard something climbing a tree over the Lick and could not Tell what it was until the moon gave sufficient light for Them to Discover what it might be and it proved to be a panther perched upon a limb waiting for Mr. Deer. They all three kept quiet and it was not long until They Heard and seen the Deer, but as soon as the Deer came to the Lick the Panther leaped upon Him and killed him quickly and then the Indian shot the Panther and made the remark to Grand Father that was the way to watch a Deerlick.
In the log house of George and Catherine there were not “any cradles for rocking Babys.” Consequently, their first son “had a bresh heap for his resting place.” The scattered settlers longed for community. It would come, and one of its chief tracks was the “Great National Road,” the highway which was conceived by General Washington. It was also known in various of its sections as “The National Pike,” the “Cumberland Road,” and finally, and prophetically for Lamy, as the “Santa Fe Trail.” Its Ohio portion was financed by Congress when the state was admitted to the union. Even as early as 1825 its extension to Santa Fe was authorized by Congress. Eventually the several states it crossed assumed responsibility for its local maintenance. It had a roadbed thirty feet in width and its earliest portions were surfaced with crushed stone and gravel. The rest of it was plain dirt. “Tree stumps eighteen inches high were left in the road but trimmed and rounded with an axe so that carriages could safely pass over them.” Along its tracks went “a steady stream of two-wheeled carts, Conestoga wagons, farm wagons, men on horseback, men on foot, men driving cattle, hogs, horses and mules.” Parts of the road were traversed by Purcell in his earliest visits, and when Lamy went north from Cincinnati, he too travelled upon it for a while. But on the straggling earthen tracks which were tributaries of the Great National Road, travel for anyone was precarious, with many creeks to cross which were often swollen in warm weather and treacherously frozen in cold. Some of these passed by curious low hills of symmetrical shape, which later proved to be Indian burial mounds holding the secrets of life in the wilderness as it was lived long before the Easterners came.
George Sapp gave part of his homestead land for a church and burial ground in 1822. Though he himself was not baptized, others of his community were, and in any case, settlers gathered together on whatever possible occasion, and so it came to be that when first, Father Fenwick of Cincinnati, and later, Father O’Leary and Father Alleman of distant parishes, rode from their stations to hold services, they found a loosely organized parish at Sapp’s Settlement with a log church called St Luke’s. A town was growing a dozen miles to the west—this was Mt Vernon, and there, too, settlers had made their congregations, in the beginning largely Methodist.
When Purcell became bishop of Cincinnati he went through the country where later he would send resident pastors. In some places, he encountered impassive hostility from those who were not Catholics, in others, all people of whatever confession gathered to see him, to hear him preach, and to take the sacraments from him if they were eligible—baptism, communion, confirmation. In the nation at the time there was lively animosity against Catholics, who kept arriving by immigration from abroad in swelling numbers—people mostly of the laboring class come to make their fortune and find new identity in republican America. Purcell, in his forest clearings, preached on the “vulgar prejudice against the Catholic Church,” refuting its “pretended [i.e., supposed] opposition to Scripture and civil and religious liberty” and defending “the much abused and calumniated convents.” Lurid rumors about the latter were feverishly enjoyed by Protestant extremists. Purcell was warmly greeted. On one journey to Sapp’s, he “preached twice from a rudely fashioned pulpit in Mr Sapp’s orchard,” and when he went to Mt Vernon, said Mass in private houses for the first time—in 1834. When the Methodist church there was refused him on one occasion, he used a private chapel built by a well-disposed Protestant. Crowds met him also in Newark, and Zanesville, sometimes so eager that he had to preach twice a day—once in the morning, and again in the evening “at early candle-light,” for two hours at a time. For many of his listeners he was the world coming to see them—they who lacked news, and theatres, and any music but their own half-remembered, half-invented songs and airs.
iii.
The Pattern
AT DANVILLE, as the Sapp settlement was now called, Lamy found a fine country of great shady groves, set in a sequence of wooded valleys where morning mists lingered paler and paler at each farther ridge. To reach his village, he had to cross the Walhondling Creek, which took its slow course to the south. In autumn, when he arrived, the creek was mild; in winter it could be an icy obstacle, in spring a treacherous flood. He found St Luke’s log church, and not far away Grandfather Sapp’s cemetery, which sat on a fine hill looking to all directions. The village was laid out on streets which rose and fell on the folding hills.
By what followed rapidly, it was clear that the people took him to themselves from the first. Since there was no place of his own in which to live, he stayed now with one, now another, of his new families. He was charged with mission settlements at varying distances from Danville, and he rode or walked to make himself known—he thought nothing, said someone, of walking from Danville to Mt Vernon and back in a single afternoon, a journey of twelve miles each way. In his halting English, of which he must have seen the humor even as he regretted its limitations, he held his meetings, and performed his routine duties, and brought his followers to join him in the matter of the church building.
Walls and a roof had been put up by the settlers, but the church was far from finished. He led them in continuing the work, and considering his difficulties, it progressed rapidly. About a year after his arrival, he wrote from Danville to Bishop Purcell, by the uncertain mails:
I am in the hope that you received the letter I wrote to you two months ago. I told you that I was most [?] uncertain whether we should go on or not, for our new church at Danville, because it’s so hard times this year; but we are going to finish it. we have many hands, and I hope it will be quite done perhaps before the last week of next month. You recollect that you promised me hundred dollars to help this congregation; and as I cannot have the least doubt about your word I have already engaged myself to pay the plaster, this will cost from 60 to 70 dollars; I am going also to get the altar made, be so good as to make me an answere, and let me know how you will do about that help for our church, when I came here for the first time, the building was under the roof, and since, we have expended more than three hundred dollars, you know, it is a frame building fifty feet by thirty-eight.
Furthermore, it had a choir gallery, and the altar was to be “handsome,” and there was to be an altar railing. The plastering was “remarkably well done by two good Irish Catholics,” The front centered on a sturdy, square tower, with a latticed belfry, topped by a cross, all in vastly simplified Gothic. Not much wider than the tower, with windows in pointed arches, the rest of the church reached back under a peaked roof. There was nothing like it thereabouts, and by 15 November—two weeks before Lamy had planned—it was, though not fully completed within, ready to be dedicated.
The bishop came from Cincinnati to perform the ceremony. He saw that the church stood on “a beautiful eminence visible for a great distance,” and that it was established on a two-acre plot. It was touching that many Protestant neighbors had helped in one way or another toward the building of the church. Almost more than a monument to religion, St Luke’s was a mark of organized society such as had never before existed in Sapp’s Settlement. Bishop Purcell gave first communions, confirmations, baptisms, and preached on the Holy Eucharist, and celebrated a solemn Mass, and in the congregation pride was mingled with righteous fatigue after great effort. Lamy was at the center of it all. By now he was revered and loved by those whom he had led in the building of the temple and all it stood for in the way of civilization.
Two days after the dedication, Purcell moved on to Mt Vernon, where, at the request of Protestants and Catholics alike, he preached and held services. There was not yet a church there—to build this would be Lamy’s next task. Meantime, he set about making a rectory for himself
