Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III IN A COUNTRY PARISH 1857-1859 The Bishop of Pennsylvania, in sending his son to Greens- burg, forestalled any possible charge of favoritism. The little parish lay beyond the Allegheny Mountains, and seemed almost as remote as a mission station of the present time beyond the Rockies. General John Forbes had passed that way in 1758 on his march to Fort Duquesne, cutting a road through the woods from east to west. Greensburg had grown up at the place where this road was crossed by an ancient Indian trail. Pittsburgh, which had arisen on the site of the French fort, was thirty miles beyond. The village was visited in the early years of the nineteenth century by observant travellers, who admired its situation on a gentle hill in the midst of a fertile undulating country, and found refreshment at the tavern of the Seven Stars. Even in 1809, a prominent building in the place was the Presbyterian Church. In 1852, the Pennsylvania Railroad came by, on its way from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh. The Rev. Joseph Doddridge, who was gathering congregations together for prayer-book worship in Western Pennsylvania early in the century, estimated that "at least one-half of the population was originally of Episcopalian parentage." But he was so alone in his ministrations that in 1818 he "entertained no hope that even (his) own remains after death would be committed to the dust with the funeral services of (his) own church." In February, 1819, Bishop Philander Chase, having beenconsecrated in Philadelphia, journeyed on horseback through Greensburg and Pittsburgh, and was the first bishop ever seen in those parts; but he was on his way to Ohio. Bishop White made his single visitation to that part of his diocese in 1825. He found five parishes — in Pittsburgh, in " Meadville, in Br... --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.