Fighting the "Catholic Menace": The Ministries of Two Couples in the "West"

  There was, in the eyes of many in the 1820s, a grave threat facing America and ultimately the entire world. Ground zero was the Mississippi Valley. As white settlers and European immigrants flocked to western lands, easterners became increasingly concerned. The newer regions of the country seemed crude, uncivilized and peopled with men and women fast drifting towards cultural and religious degeneracy. Even more alarming, many believed that there was a plot, a global conspiracy of the Roman Catholic Church and European monarchs to destroy democracy.

     There were signs seen as alarms. Between 1800 to 1840 the U.S. population expanded from five to seventeen million.  By 1840 one-third of the population lived in the Mississippi Valley. Measured against a declining birth rate of native populations, the increase was almost entirely due to immigration. In 1776, one percent of the U.S. population was Catholic. By 1860 that figure reached 37 percent, the largest single denomination. In 1822 the Society For the Propagation of Faith formed in France and the Leopoldine Society formed in Austria in 1829, both to support Catholic missions in the U.S. 

     But Protestant Americans weren’t sitting back idly. In 1826 the American Home Missionary Society formed to combat this "threat," and it was not the only organization of its kind. There were others willing to spread the word.

     Samuel Morse, later of greater fame due to the telegraph and the Morse Code, was one of the most vocal. He wrote a book called A Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States, published in 1834. According to him, Catholic missions to the American Midwest had as their real goal forcing their beliefs on people to create the twin evils of popery and despotism. Lyman Beecher, a Presbyterian minister remembered today as the father of Harriet Beecher Stowe, was the other major anti-Catholic crusader warning of this ‘evil.’

     In their view, immigration, naturalization and Catholic schools were the culprits. In fact, according to Morse, the Austrian king was deliberately sending immigrants to America as part of this take-over. The building of Catholic schools, convents, churches, orphanages and hospitals, some funded in part by the Vienna-based Leopoldine Society, was more proof. It was all a sinister design to take over the country. 

     The American Home Missionary Society monthly journal included a piece each month about how the religious fate of the world hung in the balance and the supremacy of Popism in the Mississippi Valley would spell death to Protestantism everywhere. It was a battle between no less than truth and error, law and anarchy, Christianity and Popery.

     What could be done about this “Catholic Menace?” Morse called for an end to immigration, or at least placing severe restrictions on Catholic immigration. “We must first stop the leak in the ship through which muddy waters from without threaten to sink us,” he wrote. Catholics should be forbidden from holding public office. For Rev. Lyman Beecher and organizations like the American Home Missionary Society, limiting immigration of the Irish and German Catholics was an excellent idea, but so was flooding the west with Protestant missionaries. Converting the people to the ‘right’ brand of Christianity was one of the solutions. 

     In 1755, Daniel Barber, 23, married Martha Phelps, age 20, in Simsbury, Connecticut. They had eleven children. Remarkable for the time, ten survived to adulthood. Their youngest, Abigail, known as Nabby, was only a year old when Daniel died in 1779. It is an interesting quirk of history that their oldest and youngest children, Daniel Jr. and Nabby, would be part of what became famous in its day as the “Barber Conversion” to the Catholic Church. Their grandson, William Barber Tyler, became the first Catholic bishop of Hartford, Connecticut. Four of their granddaughters and four great-granddaughters became nuns. Sister Mary Benedict Barber, would run for her life from her Ursuline convent in Charlestown, Massachusetts in 1834 when it was burned to the ground by an anti-Catholic mob. 

     Sister Josephine Barber, was sent to start schools and convents in the Mississippi Valley in Illinois and St. Louis. Sister Mary DeSales Tyler and Sister Mary Beatrice Tyler were also sent out west. Sister DeSales was missioned to Detroit and started hospitals. Sister Mary Beatrice was sent to Cincinnati to open a school, and almost immediately started an orphanage due to the great need. 

     It is also an interesting quirk that Daniel and Martha’s granddaughter, Rosetta Leonora Pettibone, joined Joseph Smith in his new Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in the early 1830s. Her son Lorenzo Snow would become the fifth president of the church; her daughter Eliza Roxcy Snow was the preeminent “Mormon” women's leader of the nineteenth century. They too would run for their lives from anti-Mormon mobs in Missouri and Illinois. 

     As other descendants of Daniel and Martha Barber moved west, they remained Protestants out of the Puritan tradition, most members of the Congregational and Presbyterian Churches. In yet another historical quirk, Daniel’s cousins’ children married Presbyterian ministers who were hired by the American Home Missionary Society in the 1830s and sent to Missouri to bring people to Christ and stave off the grave Catholic threat. 

    Each group of cousins thought they had the “One Right Way,” the only conduit to eternal life in heaven. Theirs was the only True Church. Their work to build up the kingdom, to their minds, involved the very fate of the United States and civilization in general. This article focuses on two of the Protestant cousins, sisters Julia Warner Sadd (1808-1852) and Corinne Gilmore Sadd (1810-1887), and their minister husbands. Because women’s stories were “hidden” behind their husbands, of necessity their stories are largely told through the moves and words of the men.

     It was 1830 when Joseph Merrill Sadd graduated from Auburn Theological Seminary in Auburn, New York. He was licensed, ordained, hired by the American Home Missionary Society and given his first assignment – to the wilds of Missouri.

     Nearly a decade earlier, at age 18, Joseph had been casting about, wondering what to do with his life. As his father’s oldest child and firstborn son, maybe he was expected to take over his father’s iron foundry and silversmith business in New Hartford, Connecticut. But his father's willingness to fund superior education is an indication that perhaps that wasn’t the path Harvey Sadd demanded of his son. On a March day in 1820, sitting in church, young Joseph was listening intently to the sermon when he was struck by the minister’s words, “Chose ye this day whom ye will serve.” Joseph had attended church faithfully all his life, but now he was convicted, and sure that God was calling him to the ministry. What could be better than a life bringing souls to Christ?

     First he needed to brush up on some college prep. He’d attended excellent schools in Connecticut, but he needed a little preparation. His father sent him to Stockbridge Academy where he was taught by Rev. Jared Curtis, a teacher of excellent reputation later credited by many of his former students for their success. Joseph next went to Williams College where he graduated in 1827. He continued on to Auburn Theological Seminary. There he met a fellow classmate who became a good friend, Asa Johnson. Asa was from Deerfield, Massachusetts and the oldest child of a farmer. The two graduated together. Asa was ordained as an evangelist on January 2, 1830.

     There was one more piece of business before they headed off into the mission field of the American “West” – marriage. A single man would not do. He needed a worthy companion, a helpmeet. The role of the missionary’s wife was undefined, unpaid, but vital. Joseph had found just the person to be his lifelong partner in ministry. And he found a wife for Asa, too.

     In 1829 Joseph’s father Harvey Sadd and his wife moved to Austinburg, Ohio, where he continued his work as a silversmith, and as a watchmaker. They were joining Harvey’s brother Chauncey, who moved to Austinburg by 1820 at the latest. Chauncey and his wife, Cynthia Barber Sadd, had two single daughters, Julia and Corinne. The girls were raised in a devout home, and Chauncey served as deacon in their church. A minister’s wife – wouldn’t that be a noble way to spend one’s life? 

      There must have been a letter-writing campaign. Joseph married his first cousin Corinne, and Asa married Julia on July 13, 1830 in Austinburg. Presumably it was a double wedding ceremony. There was a grace period of sorts, then the two missionary couples set out for Missouri, arriving in November. Then they “went to work in earnest;” Joseph and Corinne in the counties of Madison and St. Francois; and Asa and Julia at Cape Girardeau. 

     Probably they had impressed upon them a sense of urgency. It was still a few years off until Dr. Beecher would proclaim the situation in the West an emergency. “We have reached an appalling crisis…whatever we do we must do quickly,” he would write in Plea For the West. But there were Thomas Morse, and others, sounding alarms. In addition to the unschooled, ignorant masses of Americans in the West were the “degraded mind[s] poured over the West by the immigration of Catholic Europe.” Would the Western states be occupied for Christ or a stronghold of Papacy?

     The ministries and lives of the Sadd sisters and their husbands had parallels for some time. The first commonality was that all four contracted the dreaded “fever ‘n ague” – malaria -- in Missouri, though at different times. Eradicated in the U.S. in the 1950s, it was the scourge of southerners and of settlers moving to western locations east of the Rockies. It was a leading cause of death, especially prior to 1880. Malaria could have long-term effects, leaving the survivor with a weakened immune system, anemia or kidney damage. After a two-year stay at Cape Girardeau, Julia’s health was considered broken, and she and Asa were sent “back east” for her benefit. 

     Back east can be a relative term. First they were posted in Ohio until 1832, then they were sent farther east to established churches for a year at Richmond, New York and from February 1833 to September 1837 in Nunda, New York. 

Joseph and Corinne in Missouri

     Joseph and Corrine remained in the missionary field. They moved to Farmington, Missouri, the county seat of St. Francois County 75 miles from St. Louis. Farmington was not a new or a completely unchurched community. It was established in 1822 but Anglo-European settlers had been living there since 1800; a post office had been in existence since 1817. It would be incorporated as a town a few years after the Sadd’s tenure, in 1836. Still, it was just a courthouse village of log cabins. 

     The Sadds rented a two-room log cabin and set to work. They were not alone as another minister, Rev. Thomas Donnell, assisted Joseph. Maybe Donnell was something of a mentor. He led the first Presbyterian Church west of the Mississippi River, the Concord Church at Caledonia in Washington County. They held a series of meetings at the courthouse, and Joseph officially organized a church in May 1832, with a congregation of seven. Their request for organization read as follows:

We, the undersigned, humbly trust that our hearts have been received by the grace of God, and that therefore we have been enabled solemnly to consecrate ourselves and all we possess to Him forever, and feeling desirous to enjoy more fully the sacred worship and ordinances instituted by God; we do mutually agree to associate ourselves together in the capacity of a Church, and adopt the Confession of Faith of the Presbyterian Church in the United States, as containing the system of doctrine taught in the Holy Scriptures, and also receive the form of discipline practiced by the same church as the best mode for our regulation and government.

     Members were Elizabeth Cobb, Corinne G. Sadd, Alexander Boyd and Sarah Boyd, who were received by certificates, also Frederic Woolford, Nancy Woolford and John F. Rudy, who were received by examination. Alexander Boyd was an elder in another church and was chosen in that capacity in the new congregation. Just a few days later four more people felt impressed to join. After two years in the mission field, this must have been very gratifying. 

     Services were held at their cabin when Joseph was in town. Prayer meeting was every Wednesday. Joseph was on the road a lot, doing what he’d been doing since their arrival in Missouri. He traveled through St. Genevieve, Madison and other counties, diligently seeking converts and preaching to the faithful who lacked a church. Corrinne was typical of a minister’s wife of her time, and even in many churches today. She was not ordained; she was not allowed to be ordained, but she worked full-time for the church. Her role was considered essential. 

     Like many ministers in that era, Joseph opened a subscription school. The credit was given to him – he started a school. But who taught the school? Six days a week, it was Corinne. The seventh day - well, it was no day of rest for her. She taught Sunday school. She did this while running her household in a place and time with no conveniences, and caring for her first child, Catherine, known as Kittie, who was born in 1833. 

     There were also their prayer meetings at their cabin every Wednesday evening. Probably Alexander Boyd, church elder, led them, but Corinne was always host. 

     In June 1832 under a tree on the banks of the Whitewater River in Bollinger County, Joseph organized another Presbyterian Church. While traveling over the country he met up with a German colony, most of whom were members of the German Reformed Church. Their pastor of many years died and they were left without one. There were no great doctrinal differences between the German Reformed Church and the Presbyterian Church, so sixteen members decided to accept Joseph’s offer to join the Presbyterians. A history of Southeast Missouri and a history of the Farmington Presbyterian Church do not reconcile the overlapping dates of his ministry to both churches. It’s possible that he served as pastor of both, but nearly 60 miles on horseback would make this a difficult prospect no matter how motivated the minister might be.

     The church met first in a member’s home, then a log cabin was constructed for the purpose. 

Confronting Slavery

     Joseph was a New England Yankee. Corinne was too, though she moved west as a child. Their years in Missouri were their first witnessing slavery. The Presbyterian Church had not yet split into two factions, Old School and New School, one side supporting slavery and the New School vehemently opposed. That would happen in 1837. The tensions in the Church over slavery and other issues were immense. Joseph and Corinne fell into the New School train of thought, and found the conditions of slaves to be appalling. 

     Joseph’s testimony was published later in a couple of sources related to the seminal novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. After Southerners accused author Harriet Beecher Stowe of exaggerating or wholesale concocting the depictions of slavery in her book, she published a rebuttal, Key To Uncle Tom’s Cabin, with the lengthy subtitle, Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story Is Founded, Together With Collaborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work. Included was an excerpt from a letter of Joseph’s in which he said, “The slaves live generally in miserable huts which are without floors; and have a single apartment only, where both sexes are herded promiscuously together.”

     In a document titled  “General Testimony to the Cruelties Inflicted Upon Slaves,” written shortly after Joseph left Missouri, he wrote, “It is true that barbarous cruelties are inflicted upon them, such as terrible lacerations with the whip, and excruciating tortures are sometimes experienced from the thumb screw.”

After Missouri

     In 1835, fever ‘n ague felled Joseph and Corinne, too. They were forced to leave the mission field and returned to northeastern Ohio. It must have been a happy reunion with their families. Joseph preached at many “destitute” churches during the winter and spring of 1836. Then, seemingly retracing the steps of Asa and Julia, they were sent to western New York, near the little town of Sheldon where Corrine spent most of her childhood. They were in New York for the next six years, with one year overlapping with Asa and Julia.

     In October 1837 Joseph was installed as pastor of the First Presbyterian Church of Castille, where they stayed until April 1839. Overall the New York years were a happy time. In 1838 they had twins Lucinda and Julia, with little Julia dying in infancy. But they had Lucinda and their older daughter Kittie, and Joseph’s “labors were much blessed.” 

Back to the “West:” Asa and Julia

     In 1837, Asa and Julia Johnson were sent to Indiana. He alternated between two churches in Peru and Wabash. It’s easy to forget that these were new communities then, with recent treaties signed to force the Indians off their land. Wabash was established in 1833 as the county seat, yet when Asa arrived the courthouse was still not constructed. 

     In 1886 Asa was asked to share his memories of the Wabash church for its fiftieth anniversary, and he sent a fascinating letter, excerpts of which are below:

I will say my memory serves me pretty well in this matter….My acquaintance with Wabash commenced in this manner: I was on my way to Peru to take charge of the church there on the invitation of Mr. Newbury, he resigning the charge of the pulpit and going into the work of teaching in the Peru Collegiate Institute just started through his and Judge William M. Hood’s exertions, coming from Nunda, Livingston County, New York to Fort Defiance by public conveyance. I walked from that place to Fort Wayne, said to be forty-five or fifty miles. At Fort Wayne I failed to meet the canal packet Red Bird, and started on foot on the tow-path and walked to Peru. In the afternoon of the third day from Defiance I stopped in Wabash for some rest and refreshment….

     About two weeks from that time I had my first preaching appointment in Wabash. After this, my preaching appointments were every alternate Sabbath; in the morning in Wabash in the afternoon in LaGro. Both places were small and the people poor. 

     The church in Wabash, when I took charge of it, in the fall of 1837, numbered less than a dozen persons. 

     Of the members of the church in Wabash, only four lived in town. This meant that in bad weather with impassably muddy roads, attendance declined precipitously. Colonel Hugh Hanna was one of the first settlers in the town, and one of Asa’s biggest supporters. The church met in the same places where schools were conducted. Half his salary was paid by the home missionary society – about $200. His congregation managed to scrape up the rest in a combination of cash and goods – probably much more of it in goods.  

     Left out of Asa’s account of his arrival in Indiana, unfortunately, was how Julia and the children got there. He must have left them in Nunda and sent for them. Most typical was a journey on the Erie Canal, then a Great Lakes steamboat route to Fort Wayne, followed by a difficult wagon journey to Miami County. 

     The Presbyterian Church had been organized in Peru only in 1835 with thirteen members and met at the home of one of them. The first minister called to the church purchased a lot with a double log cabin which was modified into one room. In 1837 a frame church was built, and there Asa and Julia came to serve the twenty-four members. They would remain for a nice long stay, until 1848. In 1855 their oldest daughter Eleanor would return as the minister’s wife after her marriage to Rev. Francis S. McCabe.

     Rev. Johnson had an annoying challenge in an Episcopal “sheep stealer.” Rev. Fortune Brown was competing with Asa for members, and Asa complained in a letter about Brown. 

     “He is very bold and arrogant in his claims…he has been round among my members and gives them tracts and told them that they do not belong to the church.” In another report he said, “The Episcopalians are making great efforts. They are a mischievous people.” When Rev. Brown left for New York in 1850 and the Episcopal church membership declined, Asa was pleased. The congregation was abandoned in 1854.

     In 1842 Asa no longer had to split his time between Wabash and Peru, or more accurately Wabash and LaGro, and Peru. A minister moved from Crawfordsville to take over full-time. 

     But Asa had never limited himself even to three congregations. As a missionary, he tried to reach as many souls as he could. He held gospel meetings in tiny, fledgling settlements in the northern part of the county. A biographical sketch of a Wabash County pioneer shows the success he had in another community.

     Robert Schuler was a blacksmith from Pennsylvania who was “inspired by the news of the great western country.” In September 1837 he brought his family to Indiana by wagon over “muddy, treacherous overland” roads. He had his wife and eleven children in two Pennsylvania wagons, one pulled with three horses and a lighter one pulled by one horse. It took them five memorable weeks to make the journey, camping at night in tents and the wagons.

     He entered a claim for 160 acres near the Eel River and set about building a log cabin home. It had a walnut door, two windows covered with greased paper, a puncheon floor, and an open fireplace with a mortar-and-stick chimney. He opened a blacksmith shop and held the first school in the township at his cabin in 1839. About the same time, he accepted an invitation from Rev. Asa Johnson to start religious services, opening his home for meetings.

     Robert next built Shiloh Chapel on his property, the first Presbyterian Church in Pleasant Township, organized October 25, 1840. It was soon known as Shiloh Presbyterian Church, where he served as its first elder. 

     Around 1842 Asa and another Presbyterian minister held a three-day camp meeting, if we might use that term, at a log barn, with people traveling as far as eight to ten miles to attend. There were many “hopeful conversions,” Asa wrote, and a new church organized right then with twenty members. Two who joined were his nine- and twelve-year old daughters, Cynthia Maria, known as Maria, and Eleanor, both of whom would one day be Presbyterian ministers’ wives. Amos Seward was elected an elder of this new church. He was married to Pleaides Barber, a cousin of Julia and Corinne Sadd. In 1846 Asa partnered with a minister with the unlikely name Orange V. Lemon to organize another church in the little community of Gilead. In 1846 he also started the Presbyterian church in Larwill, where another Barber relative lived, Harlow Barber. (Harlow joined the Methodists, however.)

     He also worked on a cause dear to the American Home Missionary Society: temperance. In May 1845, he reported that several hundred souls signed a temperance pledge in Peru.      

     In his eighties, looking back over his life, Asa wrote that the Indiana years were the best times of his ministry.  

Back to the “West:” Joseph and Corinne

     In 1842, Joseph and Corinne followed the Johnsons to Indiana. In 1843 they were in Oswego, an unincorporated community at the tip of Tippecanoe Lake in Kosciusko County. Then they lived for a few years in Monoquet, another unincorporated village in the county. It was named for a Pottawatomie chief, and in the late 1830s was still an Indian village of bark-covered wigwams. 

     In 1851 they were sent to Southern Indiana where Joseph led the Monroe Presbyterian Church on land that is now the Jefferson Proving Ground. They were there until 1854 when Joseph was hired by the American and Foreign Christian Union. It was a merger of three missionary societies formed in 1849 after the ‘alarmingly’ high Irish Catholic immigration, for the purpose of converting Roman Catholics to evangelical Protesantism.

      That year, Joseph preached and distributed bibles at “many desolate places.” For six months he – and probably Corinne – operated a classical school, which may have been an economic necessity serving such poor communities. He traveled throughout Indiana and parts of Ohio on the Union’s behalf until the early 1860s. 

Julia and Asa

     Julia’s health had never been robust since their years in Missouri. She died in 1852, leaving her daughters who were 17 and 19, and a two-year old son. The following year Asa returned to New York, working as a missionary again for the synod of Albany. Then it was back to Indiana, where he taught school in Peru for two years. He attributed health struggles he had to his years along the upper Wabash River. He remarried in 1854 and in 1857 he moved to Iowa where he served as a home missionary, serving in churches in places like Adel and Redfield until his 1875 retirement. He would live out the remainder of his life with his son, Rev. Edward Payson Johnson, a prominent Presbyterian minister. Asa died in Michigan at age 89.

A New Mission For Joseph and Corinne

     Julia’s life was cut short. Corinne would outlive her sister by over thirty years in a life  of active full-time ministry. 

     When the Civil War broke out, Joseph and Corinne were sent to Louisville, Kentucky to provide comfort, aid and spiritual guidance to injured soldiers. After the war, they were given an entirely new ministry. There were so many urban poor – suffering widows, unable to adequately support themselves and their children. In general, Americans were increasingly confronted with a vastly changed and changing America. Industrialization, urbanization and immigration presented tremendous new challenges. What should be done to help the poor? How could we prevent a permanent class of poor? 

     Joseph and Corinne entered a new form of ministry as city missionaries. The rest of their story is told in the article “City Missionaries: Joseph and Corinne, and the Sadd Mission. 

Notes:

     Crude and uncivilized: Ray R. Billington. 

    Samuel Morse and the Leopoldine Society: Morse did not just object to the Leopoldine Society, but to the French Society of the Propagation of the Faith. Both were created to aid Catholic missions in North America. Catholics in America viewed them as sources to help supply a desperate need for churches and schools, not as a plot to take over the U.S., but to provide religious sustenance and educational opportunity. 

     Daniel and Martha Barber’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren who were priests and nuns: Daniel Jr. converted to the Catholic Church as did his children Truworth, Virgil and Laura. Virgil got his marriage annulled so he could become a priest. His daughters Mary, Abby, Susan and Jane all became nuns; his son became Father Samuel Barber. Nabby’s four daughters, Rosetta, Sarah, Martha and Catherine also became nuns. Her son William Barber Tyler became a bishop. 

     Malaria: Sok Hul Chong.

     Col. Hugh Hanna: When Asa Johnson arrived in Indiana, my third great-granfather, Myron Fitch Barbour, had lived in Fort Wayne for two years. For a year he’d been married to Jane Suttenfield. Jane’s aunt Eliza Taylor was married to Samuel Hanna, the most prominent man in town, and Hugh’s brother.

     Asa Johnson’s Letter: Asa mentions three people in his letter that I have gotten to “know” in my research: Hugh Hanna, Rev. Orange V. Lemon and Amos Seward. I first encountered the astonishing name Orange Lemon (who had a son, Orange Lemon, Jr.) when reading a catalog for Fort Wayne Female Academy and Collegiate Institute. Rev. Lemon served on the board and sent his children to school there. My third great-grandparents, Myron and Jane, sent at least two of their children there. Amos Seward was married to Pleaides Case Barber, Myron’s sister. In fact, In 1840, Asa conducted the wedding of Myron's youngest sibling, Pleaides Case Barber, to Amos Dudley Seward.

Temperance Pledge: Suzanne Thurman.

Family Note: Where do Julia and Corinne Sadd fit in my family tree? As the daughters of Chauncy Sadd and Cynthia Barber, they were first cousins of my third great-grandfather, Myron Fitch Barber. Myron's mother Elizabeth, and Cynthia Barber were sisters. I have written about the Barber Conversion and the several articles on family members who joined Joseph Smith in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints in other articles. 

Sources: 

     Beatty, John David. Church of the Holy Trinity (Defunct), Diocese of Northern Indiana Archives, https://scalar.usc.edu/works/episcopal-diocese-of-northern-indiana-archives/church-of-the-holy-trinity-peru

     Billington, Ray R. “Anti-Catholic Propaganda and the Home Missionary Movement, 1800-1860,” The Mississippi Valley Historical Review, Vol. 22, No. 3 (Dec. 1935), pp. 361-384.

     Chong, Sok Chul. “The Burden of Early Exposure to Malaria in the United States 1850-1860: Malnutrition and Immune Disorders,” Journal of Economic History, Dec. 2007, pp. 1001-1035. 

     CLASS OF 1827, ASA JOHNSON, https://digitalworks.union.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1055&context=alumnifiles_1827

      “Church History,” Miami County History, Genealogy Trails, https://genealogytrails.com/ind/miami/church-history.html

     Conner, J.D. Jr., editor. History of Wabash: Read at the Semi-centennial anniversary of the Presbyterian Church, May 6, 1886, Wabash, Indiana: The Plain Dealer, 1886. 

     Executive Committee of the American Home Missionary Society, Our Country; Its Capabilities, Its Perils and Its Hopes, Being a Plea For the Early Establishment of Gospel Institutions In the Destitute Portions of the United States, New York: 1842. 

     Hotchkin, Rev. James H. A History of the Purchase and Settlement of Western New York and the Rise, Progress and Present State of the Presbyterian Church of That Section, New York: M.W. Dodd, 1848. 

     History of Southeast Missouri, 1912, https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:History_of_Southeast_Missouri_1912_Volume_1.djvu/552

     LeBeau, Bryan. “Saving the West From the Pope”: Anti-Catholic Propaganda and the Settlement of the Mississippi Valley,” 1990. 

     Presbyterian Church of Farmington, Missouri, Records 1832-1982, Information Sheet, State Historical Society of Missouri, https://files.shsmo.org/manuscripts/rolla/R0114.pdf

          Railton, Stephen. “General Testimony To the Cruelties Inflicted Upon Slaves,” Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture, A Multi-Media Archive, University of English, 2006, https://utc.iath.virginia.edu/

     Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Key To Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Presenting the Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story Is Founded, Together With Collaborative Statements Verifying the Truth of the Work, Jewett, Proctor & Worthington: 1853. 

     Thurman, Suzanne. “Cultural Politics on the Indiana Frontier: The American Home Missionary Society and Temperance Reform,” Indiana Magazine of History, Vol. 94, No. 4 (December 1998), pp. 285-302.

     Weesner, Clarkson W. History of Wabash County, Indiana, Chicago: Lewis Publishing Company, 1914. 

Newspapers:

     “New Hartford in Old Times, Number Eleven,” The New Hartford Tribune (Hartford, Connecticut), 7 April 1882, p. 2.

     “Meeting For the Relief of the Poor,” The Courier-Journal (Louisville, Kentucky), 12 Jan 1864, p. 3. 

     “Mission Industrial School For Poor Children,” The Courier-Journal, 17 Aug 1866, p. 3.