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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 on donated land opposite the Danville church.

The whole pattern of his work there established the terms of his labors over the next years. He had looked no farther than Ohio—except for one occasion which seemed to threaten the continuation of work so faithfully begun.

It had to do with an impulsive notion which Machebeuf, in his parish of Tiffin in northern Ohio, seemed ready to carry out. He had been visited by the celebrated Jesuit missioner P. J. De Smet, who was already celebrated as “the Apostle to the Indians” (their name for a Jesuit was “Blackrobe”) and who brought, from his expeditions into the Far West, much of the earliest knowledge of the upper plains and Rocky Mountain regions to the established public east of the Mississippi. Machebeuf, he urged in Tiffin, should join him in his vast western missionary travels, with all its dazzling hardships and holy dangers. But what would become of Tiffin, where a little parish church of native stone was being erected? Bishop Purcell heard of the plan to go West, and knowing of the close friendship of Lamy and Machebeuf, sent Lamy to Tiffin to dissuade Machebeuf “from a project which afflicted the heart of the bishop and father.”

After hearing Lamy set forth the views of his bishop against abandoning Tiffin and going West, Machebeuf “contented himself with asking his friend,”

“ ‘Eh bien! mon cher, what would you do in my place?’ ”

Lamy—whether placing an even graver responsibility on Machebeuf or simply expressing his innermost feeling—replied,

“What would I do? All right. If you go, I will follow you.”

It was a deterrent which Machebeuf was unable to ignore. Yet the episode held a prophetic note for them both, even as they remained with their own present duties—building churches, visiting their dependent missions. Purcell knew upon whom he could depend, and how to use friendship as an instrument.