Bishop Joseph Blount Cheshire: His Life and Work

by Lawrence Foushee London

Milnor Jones left North Carolina towards the end of 1897. He, with the assistance and encouragement of Bishop Cheshire, had laid the foundations of a missionary work which was to be a credit to the church. Referring once to the character of Jones' work, the Bishop remarked: "If I had a wild mountain country full of moonshiners, I think I would like to have him, but for anything more civilized he is too savage."[35] With all of Jones' crudeness and faults, Bishop Cheshire believed him to be "really a more Godly man than many an one whose life is perfectly conventional and blameless." The Bishop often remarked that the visits he made to Milnor Jones in the mountains of North Carolina were among the most interesting experiences of his career.

Coinciding with Bishop Cheshire's efforts to expand and revive the missionary work of the church in the mountains, a movement was initiated to create a missionary district from the western counties of the Diocese of North Carolina. At the diocesan convention of 1894 a committee was appointed to study the advisability of requesting the General Convention to organize the western counties of the state into a missionary jurisdiction. It was felt by many that the present Diocese was too large to be adequately administered and supervised by one bishop. In his address to the convention of 1895 Bishop Cheshire substantiated this view when he reported that during the past year he had been able to devote only nine weeks to the western section of the state, which embraced nearly thirty counties.

The Bishop was "in sentiment" strongly opposed to a division of his Diocese, for he disliked seeing the church in North Carolina divided further. Also, he had become deeply interested in his mountain missions and was loath to relinquish them. He realized, however, the impossibility of properly serving such a large territory. Moreover, he was determined not to make the mistake which he thought Bishop Atkinson, in 1877, and Bishop Lyman, in 1882, had made when they opposed the formation of a new diocese. In his opinion, a bishop "makes a mistake, when he opposes the well-settled convictions of his clergy and people upon a matter affecting the development of the Diocese."[36]

When the diocesan convention met in May, 1895, the Committee on the Proposed Missionary Jurisdiction recommended that the General Convention be requested to set apart the western section of the Diocese of North Carolina as a missionary jurisdiction. It was further recommended that the line of division should be the eastern boundaries of the counties of Alleghany, Wilkes, Alexander, Catawba, Lincoln and Gaston. Bishop Cheshire had suggested to the committee this territorial division. Although it meant a great loss of strength to his own Diocese, the Bishop believed that the missionary jurisdiction should be made large enough to be of importance, and that it should be created with the view of its becoming a diocese at some future date. The convention adopted the committee's recommendations, and instructed its deputies to present them to the General Convention.

When this body met in the fall of 1895, Bishop Cheshire presented in the House of Bishops the memorial of the Diocese of North Carolina requesting the erection of a missionary jurisdiction. The memorial was referred to the Committee on Domestic Missions. A few days later the Bishop of Florida, chairman of the committee, reported the memorial unfavorably, stating that his committee did not believe the reasons set forth were sufficient to justify an affirmative action. He further reported that the legal and constitutional requirements had not been properly provided for. Bishop Cheshire then introduced a resolution calling for the erection of a missionary district and providing that it should be under the limited jurisdiction of the Bishop and Convention of the Diocese of North Carolina until such constitutional amendments could be adopted to remove the objections advanced by the Bishop of Florida. The House of Bishops adopted the resolution with little discussion, and two days later it was approved by the House of Deputies. Following this action Bishop Cheshire moved that the House of Bishops should proceed to the election of a missionary bishop for the newly created district. His motion met with opposition and was postponed to a future meeting of the House of Bishops. The district, which was to be known as the Jurisdiction of Asheville, was temporarily placed under the episcopal care of Bishop Cheshire.

Only a few weeks after the close of the General Convention, Bishop Cheshire, on November 12, 1895, met the first convention of the Missionary Jurisdiction of Asheville. He outlined to the clergy and laity what would be expected of them as a missionary jurisdiction, and gave much helpful advice on setting up the machinery for carrying on their work. The Bishop called to their attention the almost incalculable opportunities for extending the influence of the church in the mountain counties. The next year he greatly expanded this idea in a charge to the clergy of the Jurisdiction. The Bishop pointed out that nine-tenths of the work in the Jurisdiction of Asheville was to evangelize people who were almost wholly ignorant of the church. Such material aids as rectories, schoolhouses, and even churches, while undoubtedly helpful, were not necessary adjuncts to the primary object of the church: "to catch men." He urged the clergy to know the people, to preach to them in words they could understand, and to make religion an integral part of their lives.

After completing his first year in charge of the Jurisdiction of Asheville, and after a careful study of the manifold problems peculiar to it, Bishop Cheshire was convinced that the erection of the missionary jurisdiction was "an act of wise and prudent statesmanship." He thought that a missionary who had the oversight of three or four counties sorely needed regular visitations from the bishop, and in his opinion the work could be more effectively carried on if the bishop were able to remain a week or more with each missionary. He pressed these points upon the members of the House of Bishops in strongly advocating the election of a bishop for the Jurisdiction. Finally, in the fall of 1898, the House of Bishops elected the Rev. Junius Moore Horner, a native North Carolinian, as missionary bishop of the Jurisdiction of Asheville. He was consecrated on December 28, 1898, in Trinity Church, Asheville, with Bishop Cheshire as the consecrator. After this service Bishop Cheshire formally turned over to Bishop Horner the full administration of the Jurisdiction.

Turning now to a wholly different phase of Bishop Cheshire's work, we take up one of the most important achievements of his long episcopate, the establishment of St. Mary's School for girls as a church institution. This school had been founded in Raleigh by Dr. Aldert Smedes in 1842, and had been nurtured and maintained, through good and hard times, by its founder and his son and successor, Dr. Bennett Smedes. St. Mary's was not a church school, but its two rectors had been Episcopal clergymen, and thus the institution had been under the exclusive influence of the Episcopal Church. By 1896 Dr. Bennett Smedes was finding it very difficult to compete with publicly supported and privately endowed schools. At this time he made it known that he could no longer continue St. Mary's as a private school.

The Alumnae Association of St. Mary's at once took action to preserve the school for the church. It sent a memorial to the diocesan convention of 1896, in which it appealed to the Episcopal Church in North Carolina "either to endow the School, or to erect for it suitable buildings in Raleigh or elsewhere, and thus relieve it of one great drain, its heavy rent." The appeal met with sympathetic attention from Bishop Cheshire. Only the year before, he had remarked to the convention: "I have been, from earliest childhood, brought up to look upon St. Mary's School, at Raleigh, as the most valuable of all our church institutions or agencies in North Carolina.... I cannot too highly recommend this school to the confidence of all the people of North Carolina."

After careful consideration of the St. Mary's Alumnae memorial, the convention adopted a resolution providing for the appointment of a committee of six, to include the Bishop, with the authority to buy suitable buildings for a girls' school or to purchase land and erect new buildings. In direct reply to the memorialists, Bishop Cheshire offered a resolution, which the convention adopted, assuring the alumnae that the church in North Carolina "will do all in its power to place St. Mary's School upon a permanent foundation as an institution under the charge and patronage of the Church throughout the entire State...."