After his father's death Alexander W. Sweeney started out to make his own way in the world and was apprenticed to a tanner, whose cruelty soon forced him to leave and seek the protection of an older brother. During the autumn of 1839 while attending a camp meeting near Fayetteville, he joined the Cumberland Presbyterian church and desirous of becoming a minister, was received under the care of the Arkansas Presbytery as a probationer when about eighteen years of age. A school of academic grade had been established in the community and Mr. Sweeney became a student there, in the meantime working for his support and doing his studying at night.
When in his nineteenth year he was licensed to preach and according to the custom of his church was put on the circuit to preach a part of each year. During a period of six months of continuous service on the circuit he received only two dollars and forty cents in money, one pair of home knit socks and had his horse shod free. For four or five years he continued to attend school as opportunity afforded while preaching and in that time made sufficient progress in his studies to enable him to enter the sophomore year in college. Accordingly he went to Princeton, Kentucky, where he attended Cumberland College until 1850, and then returned to the Arkansas Presbytery, where he was at once ordained to the ministry at the age of twenty-five years, having spent eight years in preparation for his chosen work.
Soon after his ordination Rev. Sweeney joined a company of gold hunters who with ox teams crossed the plains and arrived at a gold camp on the American river in California, August 26, 1850. The following Sunday he preached to a company of miners that collected under the shade of a live oak tree, thus beginning a ministry on the Pacific coast which lasted until his physical health failed him. In 1851 he went to the Willamette valley in Oregon and was present as a visitor at the organization of the Oregon Presbytery, November 3, 1851. For seven years he preached throughout the Willamette valley, exerting a strong moral influence wherever he went.
MRS. ALEXANDER W. SWEENEY
REV. ALEXANDER W. SWEENEY