There was no lack of labor, however, in the vineyard of the Lord, and the young Levite, the second one who came out of the first Catholic seminary in North America, was immediately put to work. At Port Tobacco, on the Potomac, Gallitzin entered his apostolical career. His fervor, no doubt, carried him too far into those proverbially malarial regions; for, stricken down by a spell of fever, he was ordered by his bishop to return to Baltimore, where Gallitzin was subsequently directed to ascend the pulpit and preach to the German population which had settled that portion of the state of Maryland.
The democratic spirit of American manners, which, with its innumerable abuses, had permeated even religions existence itself, was diametrically opposed to the just conceptions of the priesthood and of the organization of the Church which Gallitzin had formed in his mind. For the primitive morals of which he was then in quest he turned to the unsettled portions of Pennsylvania. "I went there," he tells us at a later period, "to avoid the _trustees_ and all the irregularities which they beget. For success, I had { 149} no other warrant than the building of something new, that could escape the routine of inveterate custom. Had I settled where the hand had already been put to the plough, my work would have been endangered, for it had been soon assailed by the spirit of Protestantism."
In the apostolic trips which frequently took him into the then far West, on the table lands of the Alleghany range, near Huntington, where the waters of the Ohio fork away from those of the Susquehanna, Gallitzin had alighted on a settlement made up of a few Catholic families. In the midst of this Catholic nucleus he resolved to establish a permanent colony, which he destined in his mind as the centre of his missions. Several poor Maryland families, whose affections he had won, resolved to follow him; and, with the consent of his bishop, he took up his line of march with them in the summer of 1799, and travelled from Maryland with his face turned to the ranges of the Alleghany mountains. And a rough and trying journey it was;--hewing their way through primitive forests, burdened at the same time with all their worldly goods. So soon as the small caravan had reached its new home, Gallitzin took possession of this, as it were, conquered land; and, without loss of time, all the settlers addressed themselves to the work before them, and worked so zealously that, before the end of the year, they had already erected a church. The following is Father Lemcke's account of the humble origin of this establishment: