Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 16.djvu/77

Rh On February 7th of the same year he was married to Miss Lucy Taft, of Clinton, N. Y., but formerly of Wendell, Mass. Shortly after the wedding they departed in a sleigh for Cambridge, Vt. They had known each other from childhood, and their marriage was the consummation of an engagement which began two years before his entrance to college.

In February of the next year he entered upon his second pastorate at Springfield in the same state. His work of nearly two years in this place resulted in the conversion and baptism of about eighty persons. From Springfield Ezra Fisher wrote, under date of September 22, 1832, the first letter of his correspondence with the American Baptist Home Mission Society. That Society had been organized the preceding April, and while it included in its scope the whole of North America, it was religious destitution in the Mississippi Valley which gave it birth.

Western need of the gospel had appealed strongly to both Mr. and Mrs. Fisher. In sympathy with the Home Mission movement from its beginning and feeling that New England claims upon them were small as compared with those of the West, they had early decided that, if the Lord should open the way, they would gladly serve Him "in some destitute portion of the Great Valley."

Their wish met with the approval of the Home Mission Society. Dr. Jonathan Going, first Corresponding Secretary of the Society, on a visit to their church in Springfield, had encouraged them to go to the Valley the coming fall. Hoping at the time that they might do so, Ezra Fisher wrote the first letter to inform him that they felt unable to leave the church in Springfield until the next spring or fall. Late in October, however, came a letter asking him to go immediately to Indianapolis, Ind., and assuring him that the Home Mission Society would furnish him an outfit and support him in that place. Reluctantly they changed their plans and at once made ready to go.