Old Saint Thomas's Manor

...Very Tree Forget the tube of bark, Alliterative leaves, Tenacious like a hand Gnarled rootage in the dark Interior of land...

...It was given the party as a "campaign contribution...

...As early as 1639 Father White made the village a Catholic centre when he converted and baptized the young Indian queen and 13o of her subjects...

...47 ~ THE COMMONWEAL September 1I, 1929 Father Charles Sewall (a descendant of Major Henry Sewall, connected by marriage with the Calverts) built the present church in 1798...

...468 THE COMMONWEAL September II, 1929 riches, a certain sum of $250,000 in cash...

...It too is built on the site of the old chapel, and like it is connected with the residence of the priests...

...There was gentle Father Wiget, quick and active in mind and body...

...There he composed his catechism in the native dialect long before Eliot wrote his Indian Bible, and there he compiled a grammar and a dictionary of the Indian language together with other minor works...

...Father White could speak the Indians' language, he knew their customs, he helped and advised them and was always welcome among them...

...In 171o one of the priests wrote to England that they were building at a place which the fathers called "Paradise" for it was situated high above the mists of the lowlands around...

...By the time the young sentinel reached him he was surrounded by red-skin hosts crowding to give him welcome, for he was no stranger to Potopaco...

...Private and personal loans from Tom to Dick are nobody's business and do not have to be made public...

...The exiled Acadians came under his patronage too, for his books mention Acadian names to whom money was paid for "mending for the house and making for the Negroes," as well as a French miller and his boy--Janvier l'Enfant...

...During the Revolution the fathers were annoyed by marauding parties from the British ships in the Potomac...

...But he loved it--it was of Potopaco that he wrote to England: The soil is so excellent that we cannot sett downe foot but tread on strawberries, raspberries, fallen mulberries, acchorns, walnuts, saxafras, etc.--and these in the wildest woods...

...With the coming of the white men its name was soon corrupted into Port Tobacco which, though meaningless, has stood the test of years...

...Thus the Jesuits were able to retain their possessions and to continue their ministerial functions under Father John Lewis, who had been their local superior and was now vicar-general to the bishop of the London district...

...Matthews held until 1662 when he conveyed all his rights therein to Father Henry Warren...

...Afterward, when these conditions were brought to the knowledge of the authorities in Rome, measures were taken for the appointment of a local bishop...

...That particular section of Maryland is one of rare beauty, a countryside which even today is remarked for its similarity to parts of rural England...

...it was a significant conference which was held in the parlor of the old manor house that May morning in 18o6, when Bishop Carroll and his coadjutor, Bishop Leonard Neale, met with five of the Jesuit Fathers who had petitioned to be received in the new Society, to appoint Father Robert Molyneux the first superior...

...Nor was the executive side cultivated at the expense of the spiritual side in this remarkable man, for there was much evidence to show that he was a very pious soul...

...Today the old house stands in quiet dignity on its hilltop...

...A wigwam was made ready for his use and the squaws had prepared a fine meal of corn pone, hominy and a special sweetish drink made from cornmeal and native fruits...

...By that time there was a small chapel and pastoral residence built beside the river on a point near the Port Tobacco creek...

...from the gardens and the graveyard beyond the church one may look down on the point where the first little chapel stood and out over the Potomac to the far Virginia hills...

...The newly acquired manor was only beginning to develop when Father Copley died in 1853...

...Father Molyneux came up from Newtown in Saint Mary's on August I8 of the same year, and renewed his vows in the manor church in the presence of Father Sewall and Father Charles Neale...

...The Negroes about the manor still love to tell the story of how, one winter night, two strange young men called at the house to take Father Hunter in their boat across the Potomac to visit a dying man...

...Father Warren's spiritual plantation was a wide-flung field...

...Bright incidental bird Whose melody is fanned Among the bundled sheaves, Wild spool of the winding word, Reject: and let there be Only tree...

...So Father Copley's life was but a carving of new byways along an old road...

...The sailors practised marksmanship by aiming at the crosses on the tombstones, which accounts for the battered condition of the old graveyard...

...All is high wood except where the Indians have clere for come...

...STANIr-Ey J, KUNITZ...

...Many years later the roofs of both house and church were burned and the insides of both buildings completely destroyed...

...The manor lands were rich and fertile, but the corn, wheat and tobacco crops were augmented by all the sidelines of intensive farming...

...Of these men Father William Hunter was one who left a lasting imprint on the history of Saint Thomas's...

...Even in these hard days Father Hunter found it possible to change the chapel and residence from the old location on the creek to the new one on the hill where the manor house stands today...

...He sent priests to begin the missions at Frederick, Maryland, and Lancaster, Pennsylvania, providing the funds for their support...

...and as a nearby plantation still prizes a permanent ghost it seems only fitting that there should be angels for Saint Thomas's...

...He was one of the most distinguished figures in early Maryland history...

...Though the name of Father Andrew White will always be connected with the landing of the Ark and Dove and of the first missionary days at Saint Mary's, yet in this fertile valley up the Potomac lay the real home of the "Apostle of Maryland...

...The man had not sent for the priest, he said, because there was no one to send...

...A letter from General Lee to Lafayette contains the news that "Priest Hunter's house has been burned by the British," but this report referred to Father William Hunter's old house down by the creek...

...There, in the new chapel, Father Hunter hung the first church bell that broke the stillness of the Port Tobacco valley...

...The superiors in those days had to be farmers and business men as well as spiritual directors, and the combination was well balanced in Father Hunter...

...Father Meurer, tall, aquiline and silver-haired...

...This quarter of a million did not go into his estate, cash though it was...

...The homes of the prosperous settlers began to top the hills and dot the river ways...

...The land was called Saint Thomas's Manor and was taken up under the "conditions of plantation" in the same way that lands were acquired by other settlers...

...This little village of the Potopaco Indians lay near the head of a creek, tributary to the Potomac, thirty miles from where the river flows into Chesapeake Bay...

...but it was given in the form of a personal loan from a friend to the great and wealthy senator...

...The ground is commonly a black mold above and a foot within ground a reddish colour...

...The moral I prefer to draw is that in the forty-ninth century A. D. mankind will have learned that it is no use enacting laws to make water run uphill...

...Father Scanlon, red-haired and militant, and aristocratic Father McSwyney...

...He was superior in 1692 and labored there during the years which covered a most trying period in the history of Maryland...

...Colors pour in and out: Here is a timeless structure wrought Like the candelabrum of pure thought, Stripped of green root and leaf, Getting no seed to sprout, Yet lovely, lovely, God's Very Tree, Form of whose intense inner life Abstractly branches to attain What glory, Tree, what pain...

...Father John Carroll was selected for the position...

...his heirs turned it over to another great man in the Republican party...

...Working all day as a priest and missionary, he spent the long evenings by the light of a pine-knot candle giving to the world some of the most valuable additions to Indian philology...

...he did not know the two young men...

...One source of revenue was a large flock of geese, and in 1764 Father Hunter's books credit a fine crop of feathers from the live birds...

...Superior of the American missions, he directed from Saint Thomas's the extension of the Catholic Church in America...

...Angels," the Negroes will tell you today...

...Father Molyneux then transferred his residence from Newtown to Saint Thomas's, which became the first community of the new Society and was its headquarters until the bull of Plus VII, issued August 7, I814, completely reestablished the Society of Jesus throughout the world...

...No special privilege was conceded to them as ecclesiastics...

...The second Lord Baltimore was determined that no land of the province should be held by ecclesiastics as such, or claimed for the support of reSeptember I I, 1929 T H E C O M M O N W E A L 469 ligion...

...When the time came for the restoration of the Society of Jesus, Saint Thomas's was the principal seat of the preliminary proceedings in this country, and held a prominent part in the consummation of the work...

...The handsomest mansion along the Potomac," people called it and Father George Hunter who built it was, like his namesake, pastor at Saint Thomas's for many years...

...Thirty years later, when Father William McSherry was made first provincial, he likewise made Saint Thomas's his dwelling-place and the provisional headquarters of the province...

...This house, that was like Paradise to the fathers who had lived in the old one down in the iowlands, was the manor home for more than thirty years, and then another Father Hunter built a large house which was considered very grand for those days...

...There was none to supplant them as the Revolution prevented England from sending others...

...Himself a conspicuous victim of the legislation which was beginning to press so heavily upon the Catholics, he wrote a powerful appeal for fair play and the restoration of the rights guaranteed by the fundamental laws of Maryland which he entitled Liberty and Property and signed A Lover of His Country...

...Another decade will start the old mission on its fourth century...

...On his mother's side he was a great-greatgrandson of the gallant Margaret Giggs who appears beside Margaret Roper in Holbein's famous picture of Sir Thomas More's family...

...It belonged to the party, and each of the two great men became in turn its trustees...

...How did it come to belong to the party...

...The older chapel was so built that it might be considered a portion of the priest's house, in accordance with the law prohibiting public places of Catholic worship...

...Thomas Matthews as trustee, a trust which Mr...

...His father was descended from English royal blood, and both families had suffered long and faithfully for the old religion...

...Father White never came back, but in I648 Father Copley returned, and the following year he acquired formal possession of the Port Tobacco mission for the Jesuits...

...That politics is hopelessly wicked...

...So it was that the Jesuits' missions started in Charles County, Maryland--the missions which in all the years since then have had their source at old Saint Thomas's Manor overlooking what is known today as the Port Tobacco valley...

...When His Holiness Pius VII, by a brief dated March 7, I8OI, granted to Father Francis Kareu and his colleagues residing in Russia, power to form themselves into a body of the Company of Jesus and to resume and follow the rule of Saint Ignatius Loyola, approved by the constitutions of Paul III, the former Jesuits in Maryland applied to His Holiness for the same power...

...The manor lands had been settled on Mr...

...The moral...

...Earth's absolute arithmetic Of being is not in the flowering stick Filled with the sperm of sun, But in a figure seen By second eyes when we close Slow petals of the brain At evening like a rose...

...Willebrandt implies that it was "loaned" by the distillers to pay for lax enforcement of prohibition, but that makes no difference...

...Birds diversely feathered there are infinite, as eagles, swans, hernes, bitterns, geese, ducks and partridges, reds, blew, particoloured and the like, by which will be seen the place abounds not alone with profit but with pleasure...

...Born in Madrid in I594, he trod a long and thorny way to the lonely hillside grave in southern Maryland...

...Since then nearly one hundred years have passed and the work goes on the same, day after day and year after year, in the old manor house...

...They rowed Father Hunter to his own shore in silence and he saw them no more...

...The names of the men who have lived under its ancient roof, or there laid down their work to rest on the hill beyond the church, march through the pages of its history like a procession of faithful crusaders...

...In 1765 he recorded a deed from Carroll for a lot in Baltimore Town which was to provide the beginnings of Baltimore's Catholicity...

...It was not in the assets of either National or State Committee, which by the law directing water to run uphill must always be public...

...but this morning the village had a special welcome for him as he haft come down from Kittamaquindi the capital of the Piscataways, to make his home with them...

...If one is thoughtful it is easy to bridge the centuries and see Father White's little boat come silently around the bend of the river...

...This was Father Andrew White from the pale-face settlement down the river at the place they called Saint Mary's...

...nor was it the other great man's, either...

...The same day Father SewaU renewed his vows and Father Neale, who had been only a novice at Ghent in the old Society, pronounced his vows for the first time...

...It abounds with delicate springs which are our best drinks...

...The home mission must have been looking up by that time for he had an organ sent from Philadelphia to Saint Thomas's and his accounts for the year 1763 show that he paid an organist twenty pounds a year...

...Records gathered from various sources do not all agree on dates, but it is likely that Father John A1tham and Father Roger Rigbie were the companions of Father White from time to time, until the last year of his stay at Potopaco when he was joined by Father Thomas Copley...

...Accordingly, in I8O6, this was granted them, subject, however, to the father-general in Russia...

...The solitary black-clad figure rowed steadily with practised oar to the shore of the village and pushed the boat well up into the rushes...

...During the whole time of the war there was no communication between the priests in America and their bishop...

...No wonder the English Jesuits loved it--they were mostly Englishmen who came to the manor in those days...

...At the time of the suppression of the Society of Jesus in 1773 there were twenty priests in the American missions, all of them Jesuits...

...A portion of the original chapel does duty today as a sacristy...

...Because the money, obviously, was not his...

...They were restored on the original foundations and walls of the old mansion where Father George Hunter lived and died...

...The lives of many of them would furnish interesting biographies...

...The wigwam was the foreruhner of the manor seat which was to be the scene of so much Catholic history...

...He established the first Catholic school in Baltimore Town which was taught by Acadians...

...Pictures of some of the most colorful personalities must linger in the memory of many still living...

...OLD SAINT THOMAS'S MANOR By ETHEL ROBY HAYDEN NE bright June morning in the year I64I, a young Indian brave stood on a hill above the little group of wigwams that was Potopaco and watched a small boat come around the great bend of the Potomac...

...Then, in 1645, Puritan England put out a vicious hand to the throat of the little colony in Maryland, and Father White and his companions were seized and transported as malefactors across the ocean...

...Father Vicinanza riding his sorrel pacing horse...

...Other fathers helped to evangelize the settlements elsewhere, but Potopaco was Father White's special domain...

...The years have brought to Saint Thomas's a mellow personality, and the extent of its influence would be hard to estimate...

...If the Jesuits employed their private possessions in the service of religion it was from no obligation attaching to their grants...

...The records of the earlier years give up such names as Fathers Francis Pennington, William Hunter, George Therold, Peter Atwood, John Lewis, Benjamin Roels, Joseph Mosley, and many names of Charles County families prominent there today...

...it might have been loaned by any wealthy corporation desirous of favors from government, just as well...