Page:Oregon Historical Quarterly volume 17.djvu/475



CORRESPONDENCE 467

Jacksonville, the trading town for the rich mining district now attracting many miners on the Rogue River, and but seven miles from the Agency. I trust you will be casting about you with prayerful anxiety to find the very man to meet vice in all its forms and succeed in that place. . . ,

Numbers of appointments must be made, which will re- quire from $300 to $400 each from your Board, or the cause must be given over into other hands for the want of effi- cient ministers. The Old School Presbyterian Church has three missionaries here, with but one church, very small. 279 Con- gregationalists have seven or eight ministers, the Methodists about a score, Seceders four to five, Cumberland Presbyter- ians four or five, Campbellites six or seven and Anti-mis- sionary Baptists six or eight. It strikes me that four mis- sionaries should be immediately appointed for Oregon who should be subject to the advice of the ministers here in the selection of their location. Marysville, Salem and Portland are all suffering for want of efficient Baptist ministers, yet the distance is so far from New York and the time is so long before you can secure the labors of the right man that we are obliged to throw such laborers into the field as we have and, by the time of the arrival of a man just adapted for the field, we have a man in the way who cannot be removed without temporary injury to the cause.

Our school at Oregon City is doing well as yet. Br. Chan- dler's labors close in about two weeks and we have found no teacher to succeed him. We expect we shall be compelled to take up a temporary teacher. The Trustees, at a late meeting, instructed me to correspond with you and request you to secure for us a teacher, if possible, from one of the New England or New York colleges, who wishes to identify himself with a rising institution and grow up with it, with hopes of permanency in the profession of teaching. We think

279 The three old-school Presbyterian missionaries were Revs. Lewis Thompson, Robert Robe and E. R. Geary. J. A. Hanna had also probably arrived by this time. The church was probably the one at Corvallis. Bancroft, Hist, of Ore., II:68o, 681.

Among the Congregational ministers were Revs. Gushing Eells, Elkanah Walker, J. S. Griffin, Harvey Clark, George H. Atkinson, Horace Lyman.